Feast your eyes on this beautiful Flash animation by Renaud Hallée. Hypnotizing yet soothing visuals this good are usually scripted or done by other fancy mumbo-jumbo – but not here! Renaud painstakingly hand-animated each object on the screen using nothing but the timeline. My words do not do it justice, so just go check it out.

Four Letter Words from Rob Seward on Vimeo.

Four Letter Words is an arrangement of fluorescent light fixtures as an alphabet controlled by algorithms. Consisting of four units, each one is capable of displaying all 26 letters of the alphabet.

The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence, derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association.

In other words… WOW.

Amazing integrated ad by Tostitos + Vimeo. Click the picture to see for yourself…

What do you get when you cross the Tour de France, a team of robot engineers and hundreds of gallons of liquid yellow chalk? You get Chalkbot, of course!!

It is a long-standing tradition at the Tour de France for fans to spend hours creating elaborate messages and illustrations along the course for riders to see as they whizz by. Chalkbot automates this process by allowing user-submitted messages of hope to be sprayed on the road about eight hours ahead of the riders. Once the message is approved, it is sent to the Chalkbot which will then spray the 40-character message, take a photo and then email the photo along with GPS coordinates to the person who submitted it. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Built by DeepLocal and StandardRobot in partnership with Nike and Wieden+Kennedy, Chalkbot is like a giant self-contained pneumatic dot matrix printer that is mounted to a trailer pulled by a truck and can print messages and graphics of varying types on the road. Users can submit their own inspirational messages by Tweeting them @chalkbot, texting “LIVESTRONG,” followed by your message, to 36453 or directly at the official Chalkbot website.

Check the video for some action-shots and a little behind the scenes magic.

What do you get when you put a homeless father & daughter into The Sims 3 game with no money or food, giving the father traits of a crazy, mean spirited old man and the daughter traits of a kind young girl with low self esteem? You get Alice and Kev! This virtual social experiment has become a play-by-play of the daily lives of this father and daughter trying to make it with absolutely nothing. The blog is run by Robin Burkinshaw, a game design student based in the UK. It’s usually updated daily and will feature a group of events that happened to either Alice, Kev or both from the previous day.

Now, before you dismiss it – give it a shot. I thought it couldn’t even be remotely interesting – but you will grow to love the characters, the trials and tribulations they go through and the other strange people they meet. Keep in mind, these characters are running on ‘auto-pilot’ – meaning they are rarely interfered with… and THAT’S what makes it so interesting. The things they do, the relationships they form, the fights they get into – they are all done on the intuition of the character!

You can start with the introduction or you can jump right in to the first post. They also post when the blog updates via their Twitter account here. Definitely one you will want to check regularly!

if you are even remotely interested in information, data, facts and numbers – let me introduce you to nicholas felton – aka - feltron. not only is he obsessive with his info gathering, he has a way of graphically displaying it all in a beautiful,well organized and aesthetically pleasing way. working with graphics every day, i personally know how hard it is to keep data organized and also easy on the eyes at the same time. spend some time digesting the 2008 annual report (as well as the older ones) and you will find endless slices of data from his year. sounds boring? think again – it is wonderfully served up into interesting bite-sized pieces that rope you in. you can order his print versions for $5 if the on-screen experience just isn’t doin’ it for you. nicholas’ other project, daytum, will eventually allow you to start keeping track of your own life data, but i say eventually since it is still a closed, private beta at this time. nicholas, if you are reading this – drop me a line, i’d love to …ahem… check out daytum!

goodby, silverstein & partners gives us a plethora of information wrapped up into one graphic website for an onslaught of information. this site was created to promote sprint’s mobile broadband card and gives you data on everything from the number of homes being built at that moment, to the number of eggs being produced, to the current flights in the air, to… well you get it. tons of info you never thought you would need, yet somehow get hypnotized into watching. none of the data is made up and is all based off of real-time feeds and computational data. be sure to check it out. make sure you have some free time, you’ll need it!

urtek is a wonderful trip into the world of info-voyeurism . imagine a completely anonymous forum to voice your opinion on the most random of questions, then instantaneous poll results presented in pie-chart-fashion. you can even register to ask your own questions! if you’re anything like me then info graphics are a slight obsession. hours of fun, especially when you start asking your own questions.

beautiful work from our friends to the east. be sure to click on portfolio and then check out all the work – its all very well done!

Done by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to promote Saturn’s new Green Line hybrid cars – with the help of the Barbarian Group & Obscura Digital, they created a wall of virtual grass that swayed when people walked by the 45 foot screen.

Very cool stuff!

Click the image to read all about it – be sure to check out the video and the interactive display…!