I saw an opportunity to explore some of the many different interests learned so far in my graduate education - 3d with OPENGL, XML parsing, interfacing Java with HTML - and combine them into a project idea that had been similarly inspired by my other interest: how could physical and virtual methods for reading data meet, and what could be learned about this interaction?

This idea was mapped onto something else I really enjoy: reading the news. In this age of digital news consumption, and considering that print journalism is dying a slow but revolutionary (evolutionary?) death, we shouldn't miss the opportunity to explore what both media forms can bring to the end product; after all, does news consumption need to be wholly in a 2d, digital format, or does it need to always remain in the realm of print (as some of the older generation argue)? We need to consider, as news consumption is changing, what is lost in its physical format, like the satisfying weight and inky texture of the Sunday Times, and what is gained in its newer home, like the power to dynamically present the news and its accompanying media.

I then faced the challenge of how to create an interface that represented this combination of physical and digital news consumption. The choice of a cube was more than architectural in my mind; the shape itself, rather that that of a pyramid or sphere, lends itself to easy operability and comprehension when used with distinct forms of data.  Furthermore, I built a top navigational bar so that users could select which part of the newspaper they want to view; each section of the NYTimes, therefore, would get its own cube, with a total number of 13 stories per cube or per section (1 main story, 12 sub stories). Each face, representing each story, would be an individual surface existing in a 3d environment and could be maneuvered by clicking and dragging the mouse or selected by hovering the mouse over that surface and clicking (the result of this click would be the cube's movement to the right, out of the screen, and the appearance of that particular story).

To display the stories, though, I actually had to take some extra steps I didn't plan on. It seems that the NYTimes.com will only interface with browers or programs that accept cookies, so in order to get over that hump (as Processing doesn't actually accept cookies), I had to user the cURL library available in PHP. These PHP files acted as buffers between the Times's site and my program in that it accepted the cookie from the web but also formatted the story for the program in Processing.

This portion of the project left open the possibility of what was actually going to represent the stories beside just a surface on the cube; after all, if the stories were just represented by surfaces on a cube with rollover capabilities (in my program, when you roll over the story's surface, that story's title, author and date of submission appear to the right), then there would be no graphical point of interest to engage the user. Therefore, I brought in the power of Flickr to pull in images that shared the same categorical word as the Times story (I pulled the category for each story from the RSS feeds for each section of the Times). This was done by doing a query through Processing into Flickr, and then pulling that image out of the Flickr database into Processing using the loadImage() function.

Turns out, however, that it's not all that simple comparing the category of a NYTimes story with that word's top search item through Flickr. For example, if the story in the Times was entitled "Thai Protestors Blow Up Parliament" and the top category for that article in the feed was Thailand and then that word was used in a Flickr search for pictures that were categorized as Thailand, what would the likely image be? An idyllic image of Thailand, of course. The article's title and its graphical representation on the cube, the idyllic vacation shot of Thailand, would be contradictory, but in my opinion, contradictory in a way that underlines the possibilities of the new digital form of news consumption, in which one day the top image could be that vacation shot but on another a more somber image.