The Microsoft Visualization Language (or the Vedea project) 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.

Vedea is designed to enable scientists and domain experts to create and incrementally refine interactive visualizations suitable for data exploration and publication without having to learn the details of complex rendering and visualization APIs. In Vedea, data can be coupled to visual attributes in a declarative fashion.

(Vedea) 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.

Runtime and Authoring Environment

Vedea programs can be edited in Notepad or an html text input and are compiled by the Vedea runtime.  We are working on a standalone compiler that will allow you to create intermediate code that can be used at runtime instead of source code.  The Vedea runtime (the program that compiles and runs Vedea code and hosts the graphical display window) can run either on the desktop or as a client-side web control.  One of the key areas we are concerned with in the runtime is to increase the performance and cross-platform compatibility of the web-based runtime, though Vedea is dependent on .net 4.0 and the DLR so even with OpenGL compatibility, we may have to wait for ongoing Mono development before we can reach beyond the Windows family.

Getting Vedea

The Microsoft Visualization Language and its runtime will first be available on viahttp://research.microsoft.com/Vedea.  You won’t find it there now (you just looked, didn’t you?) but we will be posting it very early in the coming year.  We’re eager to get it out for people to play with, but we have a bit of work to finish and a fair bit of packaging to do before we can post it on the web site.  Forums will be available for questions and discussion and I’ll post samples and discuss features here.  Vedea is an ongoing experiment here at Microsoft Research Computational Science Laboratory and like all experiments (and all pre-release software) it’s final shape and outcome is uncertain, but there has been a lot of interest in it and we’re eager to get some community experience and feedback.  I hope you found this interesting and hope you will give the Microsoft Visualization Language a spin when we post the first downloadable version.

Vedea is due to be made available as a Community Technical Preview (or CTP) through this web site early in 2010.

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