5 Alternative Ways To Follow The 2014 World Cup
Awesome geeky examples of creative digital visualisation, all taking a fresh perspective on the action in Brazil.
The 2014 World Cup is proving to be perhaps the most open and exciting since 1986, and there is certainly no shortage of hype surrounding the top players and teams. If all the goals, thrills and spills of the games have not been enough to get you into it though, these awesomely geeky examples of creative digital visualisation, all taking a fresh perspective on the action in Brazil, could be what you need.
The 12th Man
Bookmakers have released this promotion piece for the duration of Brazil 2014, passionately labelled The 12th Man: The Sound of the World Cup. Taking all the latest World Cup Twitter activity and visualising it within a virtual stadium to enable you to find out which players, pictures, stadiums and tweets are creating the biggest Twitter frenzies (as well as providing some handy World Cup stats for each side); this is the place to get the social media World Cup low-down. View: The 12th Man
FiveThirtyEight World Cup forecasts
If you are trying to work out which sides, and players, will make the biggest impact in Brazil, the forecasting visualisation by FiveThirtyEight which draws its info from the Soccer Power Index maintained by ESPN could be the site for you. It provides a calculation off the odds for each team, at both group and knockout stage. Its not infallible, but then nothing about sports betting ever is. View: World Cup Forcast
World Cup Postcards
One of the most charming Brazil 2014 visualisations is this creation from the Splinter design agency, which is from Liverpool. It features a postcard for each of the 32 countries competing at the World Cup, with smart animations on one side and facts and trivia about them on the other. There is also a practical purpose, as they are intended to make the usual office World Cup sweepstakes a bit easier and more colourful. View: World Cup Postcards
The World Cup Of Everything Else
This fairly pointless, but thoroughly entertaining, infographic from WSJ shows you how each country would fare if things other than football ability were the criteria. On the left hand side you will see a list of options (such as biggest urban population and highest traffic death rate), while the right side has the actual tournament graph. Just click on a category and the graph changes depicting the results all the way through, to the eventual winner for example Iran would be the winners of the Highest Traffic Death World Cup. View: World Cup Of Evertything Else
#TwitterWorldCup
The fans have a huge role to play in the success of each team, and this visualisation from social media innovation Harkable tracks the number of Twitter hashtags there are for each team, to see which nations supporters are making the best use of this social media platform to get behind their team. View #TwitterWorldCup