I have a programming challenge which might interest an experienced processing programmer (or existing team of programmers.)

It is for recreational (and possibly ultimately educational) purposes, not for commercial reasons.

The task is to produce a time-animation of a 3-dimensional seismicity dataset.

The data is positional, time, and magnitude data, and comes from the NZ seismic catalogue (held at geonet.org.nz ).

It's fresh, online, in the public domain, and lots of fun to play with!

Years ago I animated a few days worth it in Delphi 3, but even then I was well aware that processing would deliver a better result.

The key was to display each quake as a (small) rapidly decaying filled circle, at the appropriate x-y-z location, and then displaying the next one the same way.

In this way, one could watch series of minor earthquakes sweep through the country.

It took a while to calibrate the display persistence (i.e. a whole seismic event should be over in 3 seconds), and to set the appropriate speed of the animation (e.g. 24 hours of data might last 5 minutes of screentime), but it was a very heady thing to see, once these parameters had been properly set!

I've been meaning to learn processing for about 6 years now, but never will, due to other time demands.

Perhaps one of you is interested in exploring this interface between scientific data and information visualization. It should not be technically difficult challenge, and the results should be giddily breathtaking (as you reveal the earth's pulse. I kid you not). The skills you learn seem highly portable, and the basic model should be applicable to other datasets. I've done it with a very dense lightning strike dataset too, but earthquake data has a more engaging rhythmic quality.

I'm a bit embarassed that I never thought to ask before, so sorry about that. But, I offer it now as a discussion starter, and look forward to seeing peoples' reactions (and maybe even prototypes).

Kind regards
Paul