I'm not related to the project. I shared a cool link I found online.
But I can think of at least two improvements over using regular colors. The first one being better support for people with color blindness when using a large amount of categories. And the second one is the possibility of showing more than one value at each sector. Something like http://i.imgur.com/SdLeAPa.png shows combination of two kind of data. One being the light/dark background, and the other being the circle/dash pattern
Yes! The color blindness point is a good one. It's amazing how 2 different colors can end up being basically the same when someone is color blind. This image (http://i.imgur.com/4IbhU9w.png) has an example.
Imagine a chart/map/whatever using the 2 colors on the left, but looking to you like the ones on the right. Not that useful.
Actually I was giving a quick talk about this stuff at work using this very example and someone in the room was colorblind and he couldn't tell there was variation in the colors in the sentence. So, basically I got immediate vindication for haranguing the designers.
