I really like the idea of raw unedited data. The closer we get to captured scientific data the better the feeling of exploring the planet in real life is for me. The whole artistic spirit of realism leaves me a bit flat because it ends up being like Jurassic park dinosaurs - the missing parts filled in with frog DNA and jacked up for theme park amusement. Colours blown out, infinite camera perspectives, musical stings and character plot or gamified systems of interaction.
Exploring raw data is closer to participating in electronic discovery than exploring an artists attempt at making a huge empty planet palatable to the spending consumer.
Depends on what you mean with "raw data", the pictures shown in the post are clearly calibrated data: you can tell because there isn't a lot of noise and other camera artefacts.
you totally captured the emotional response I had to these CD-ROM sets... I just wish I'd written it better, but that's just it there.
It was certainly cool to decode the raw stuff myself, although Iv'e been told so many times since I wrote that to either 'enjoy' the artistic version, or get some 'better' version of these things already transmogrified... But I wanted to do it myself!
It really did feel like I was accomplishing something when I got the first image to render, I guess it's the Ikea fallacy? Oh sure any idiot can click on a JPEG but can you follow well documented steps, and use a highly portable program to let you reproduce the same images?
Either way, I had fun doing it, although it feels like I did this a lot longer than a year ago...
Exploring raw data is closer to participating in electronic discovery than exploring an artists attempt at making a huge empty planet palatable to the spending consumer.