Month: June 2016

Do Academy Awards and People’s Ratings Get Along?

Sometimes, sophisticated movies that get nominated and wins Academy awards are not generally well perceived by the public. Some people also say that the Oscars are very political, and that they are forged or manipulated to benefit a group of people, and they are not really awarded for performance. This hypotheses is always backed up with saying that general and critiques rating do not usually align with the awards.

I was assigned a small task as part of an InfoVis project to find out: Do public ratings of movies match academy awards?

Continue reading Do Academy Awards and People’s Ratings Get Along?

Experimenting with Preattentive Visual Variables

Animation has proven to be a major attention-grabber for users. Whether it is transition animation, or same-state animation, UI designers are always trying to utilize it. A thing to consider during animation or visualization is preattentive features. Preattentive features are those aspects of a visual presentation that our iconic memory picks up, like color, size, orientation, and placement on page. In other words, they are any attribute “which is processed in spatial memory without our conscious action. In essence it takes less than 500 milliseconds for the eye and the brain to process a preattentive property of any image”[1]. I had a chance to work on a project where we had to evaluate some visual animations/attributes to check if they are preattentive or not. Continue reading Experimenting with Preattentive Visual Variables