I’ve been spending a lot of time on interfaces and visualization lately, as part of a new conference that melds Big Data, Ubiquitous Computing, and New Interfaces. Along the way, I was struck by these two extremes of visualization.

At one extreme, there’s the Canadian filmmaker who’s implanted a camera in his eye socket. It’s a great example of embedded, ubiquitous data collection — something we’ll likely all take for granted very soon. This is visualization in the truest sense.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Allosphere, an immersive, three-storey-tall sphere used for visualizing and interacting with data.

These two spheres are very different. One collects a single person’s perspective; the other reveals huge amounts of data. One shows things at an intimate, human scale; the other zooms out to galazies or in to neurons.