Introducing the Microsoft Vedea Visualization Language

In early 2010 Microsoft will be introducing a new visualization language labeled Vedea. There is already a webpage on Microsoft Research dedicated to the Vedea Visualization Language, but the Redmond company has published nothing more than a few general details about the new language. It will be only in 2010 that the software giant will make available both the Microsoft Visualization Language and its runtime. For the time being, Martin R. Calsyn, Microsoft software architect, discussed the company’s new visualization language.

“Vedea is a prototype of a new experimental language for creating interactive infographics, data visualizations and computational art. It is designed to be accessible to people who are either new to programming or whose primary domain of expertise is something other than programming. We wanted to give those users a tool that they can use to realize their own vision and visualizations without having to engage skilled programmers, but have it be an environment that skilled programmers would not find limiting,” Calsyn stated.

According to Calsyn, Videa, which was inspired by “Processing,” is based on .NET 4.0’s Dynamic Language Runtime. Microsoft built the new visualization language to be syntactically similar to C#, in order to make it as simple as possible, in its basic form, essentially a set of functions with no classes at all. At the same time, for developers that will want to do object-oriented programming, the introduction of classes will indeed be possible, Calsyn promises.

“The motivation for building Vedea comes from the Microsoft Computational Science Studio. It’s no use facilitating modelling and computation if you don’t give the user a way to visualize the results. Simple charts are ok in general for simple data sets, but not for facilitating deep interactive exploration of data with many dimensions or for facilitating the type of exploration that leads to speculative visual exploration or visually-inspired ‘aha’ moments,” Calsyn explained.