Helios: Visualizing TechCrunch data with OpenFrameworks

Once a quarter, the Technical and Product Team at Comcast lets all its engineers participate in a “Lab Week”, a tradition that started a while back at CIM and now encompasses a much larger Engineering group across Comcast. Goals of labweek can be different, from learning new technologies to pitching new products and services. You can read a bit more about lab week here

This quarter, I (and Gabo by coercion) decided to work on a data visualization project, mostly as an excuse to learn OpenFrameworks. For the unfamiliar, OpenFrameworks is a C++ based toolkit for “creative coding”. Its used quite a bit in a variety of fields visualizing information or just creating very rich visual imagery. For example, it was used in Tron:Legacy for creating a variety of visuals used in the movie. Being in C++, it gives you so much power and its really nice not really worrying about how many pixels/shapes you are putting on screen. The other thing thats really cool is that its cross platform and your C++ code is compiled to OpenGL based desktop apps or OpenGL ES based Android or iPhone apps.

The app itself was interesting: At my current group, Comcast Innovation Labs, we work quite a bit with startups but often I am very unfamiliar with their history. So the goal of the app was to represent the startup data and see how they compared with their competitors.  We never finished our final vision, but the app as it stands currently lets you plug in names of companies and the app will render them on the stage with circles representing the size of their funding on a timeline of when they did close their funding rounds as well as any news stories that mentioned them in that timeframe. You can see a video of the app in use below:

We went from barely remembering C++ and reading up on OF to the project shown below in 4 days. The code is not super clean and there are is also a lot of code that we ended up not using thats in the codebase, but if its on GitHub if you want to take a look. And if you want to install the app just to check it out, you can download it from here

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur