Information visualisation

I think there's definitely some interesting work to be done with new and improved visualisations of large genomic datasets. I spent a couple of weeks earlier on this year trying to build a DAS viewer with Lazlo, until it became apparent that Flash isn't the language to use if you're manipulating lots of data (it gets sloooow). If only Java was capable of prettier graphics...

Anyway, I recently came across information aesthetics, which is a blog about all things visualisation. They link to some great ideas - I loved this one, and this one is nice, too. A lot of it is art installation sort of stuff.

More specific to bioinformatics is Ben Fry's work in "genomic cartography". Ben is also one of the people behind processing, a Java based graphical scripting language (though perhaps that description does it a disservice) which has been on my to-learn list for months. Robert Kosara also has some interesting ideas and papers on his personal web site concerning molecule visualisation and a very cool depth of field like effect.