Another SVG challenge -- virtual weather station

For maybe five years now, I have given my Interface Design students a
wide variety of possible final projects to choose from [1]. There are a
few several on which nobody has made much progress over the years. Today
someone showed me a demo of a new beta desktop environment (called
BumpTop [2]) would work. It reminds me of some of what I've been talking
about in terms of "physics in layout" and the <superpath> idea, and
presents some very intriguing concepts for interface. Anyhow, they have
a little widget thingy that starts to look a bit like the virtual
weather station I've been asking my students to do. Given that the idea
is starting to reinvent itself outside of my own little world, I figure
it's time to try to challenge some folks other than my students (if for
no other reason than to save someone the agony of accidentally trying to
patent something for which prior art already exists).

 

So here's the challenge:

 

Some people work in offices that have no windows. Let's build one for
them.

 

Make an SVG page that determines the visitor's geographic location
(based on IP address, or direct query through a form).  Next
artificially generate an animated depiction of what the weather outside
would look like based on current weather data (e.g. precipitation, wind
velocity and temperature data) from the National Weather Service), the
visitor's latitude and longitude, the time of day, and the time of year.
How light or dark it is should vary as a function time of year,
latitude, humidity and cloud cover. 

 

For example, if it is currently raining heavily and the wind is blowing
very hard, and it is noon in October in Nome, and the temperature is -3
C, the sky will look rather different than similar circumstances at
17:00 in Miami at a warmer temperature.

 

Overall weather categories (like rain, snow, sleet, hail, sandstorms,
etc.) should be chosen from some relatively international weather
vocabulary if such exists. 

 

To depict a windy day when there is no precipitation or airborne sand,
one may wish to draw artificial trees and or clouds, to show the effect
of the wind.

 

The best entry will receive the largest smile so tell all your friends
and neighbors.

 

David

 

[1] http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/cs427/projects.htm

[2] BumpTop demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ 

[3] new features for SVG
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/Spec.html