Turn Mouse Events into Art

https://iographica.com/ is a similar application that makes prettier pictures. (Anti-aliased rendering, more sophisticated visualisation that maps ‘mouse stops‘ of different lengths to disks of varying sizes, and maps time to colour.) Hacking Karbon to teach it similar tricks could be a fun project; maybe Pycairo would be suitable for better rendering?

How much information can we extract from images like this, such as, which programms were used by whom?

Let us play a little Sherlock Holmes: At the right we see the usage pattern of a scrole bar. So the user is operating at least one programm in full screen mode. There are no clicks in the upper right or lower right. So the scroll bar was quite large and the user seems to prefer the upper third of the scroll bar for moving it.

There are no clicks to the upper right corner, but several to the upper left. Mac style interface? Or just one application running in full-screen all the time?

The pattern at the top indicates a menu or tab row. So probably no gaming?

Not many clicks at the left few inches, but quite a few in a vertical pattern thereafter. Browsing HN? Or an application with a little used side bar or side menu? Coding? Can we identify the IDE?

Several click to the same spot towards the upper right indicate either a closing button of a re-occurring modal dialog or a button (unlikely) at this place.

The pattern at the centre seems to indicate text processing of some kind, where the user tends to prefer a line a little below the middle of the screen.

Some other patterns in the center seem to indicate secondary windows: dialogs or sub-frames of the main application. There is no indication of switching application via a task bar at the bottom of the screen. So there is none, or only a single application was used all the time, or the user prefers another method of switching applications, such as ALT+TAB.

Anything else?

Is it just me or is this simply a heatmap of the mouse events?

Hardly "Art" with a capital 'A'. It's more "a good set of data for a paper" than "Art".

Cool idea, I'd like to see different types of users output. Say a programmer vs a call of duty player vs someone browsing Facebook.

Interesting how this idea resurfaces every few years again. I dabbled in it 12 years ago: https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-02/13-creating_art_by_d...

I tried this one yesterday and my results looked so much worse that I wondered if they specifically tried to make it prettier (which amusingly would make it more 'art' as some people don't agree with the label).

Turning mouse events into art is just what illustrators and digital artists do every day :p

nice, thinking if could generate more variants other than dot line...

But is it Art?