Bitbroker is a proof of concept for transaction visualization. We have a set of players and a sequence of transactions in time. A transaction can involve money, or energy, or anything that can be represented by a number and therefore, accumulated. All these transactions or events are located in time and represented as a timeline in the bottom of the window. Over this time line we draw a time window. This selects the time range in which the transactions will be drawn. The idea is to move and resize this time window to explore over all the recorded events.

The players or participants in the transactions are put in a circle. Each one is assigned a sector of the circle based on its “importance”, which is assigned “a priori”. The radius (or height) of the sector shows us the balance or accumulated “value” of every player. All of them start with a zero balance which evolves in time as we move the time window.

Transactions are drawn as curves from one player in the circle to another. The thickness of the curve is related to the amount of the transaction. Bigger transactions get thicker curves. We use the colors to show the direction of the movement (from orange to blue), which is coherent with the color code we use for the players in the circle. Only those transactions that fall within the time window are shown as curves in the circle.

This kind of representation can be useful to explore market transactions (share movements), money exchange between poker players, import and export among countries or any other interaction. This is just a generic demo.

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With this visualizer we inaugurate our python framework which is being released under GPL. It intensively uses numpy and OpenGL. This framework is still far from “ready”, but we are working on it and its documentation to get some criticism and maybe participation from others. You can get the code and instructions from the project hosted at google code here or directly download precompiled binaries from this link But we still recommend to read the document. If you don’t have the time to try this, just watch the video above.