Gravity Mapping of Seafloor

16 million cycle journeys across London

Programming Update

Finally getting the hard-coding of .dxf files out of Processing down... below is the density map of 500,000+ GPS points for four people in Rome that I collected last year.

GPS Maps

Update on the progress of the maps (in processing).

Worked on integrating both velocity of travel (squares) and density (circles) in combination with gps traces.

Three Minute Thesis

As part of my participation in the Three Minute Thesis Competition at uWaterloo, we had to choose a single slide to represent our thesis (and present it in under 3 minutes). I decided to use one of the first plots I did of the GPS data collected from the uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic Map study that I completed late last year. Curious to see how the event goes down tomorrow.

 -gc

uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic Map

As part of my participation on the uWaterloo New Student Services Building Project Committee, I ran a research study to collect GPS points from students on campus over a 2 week period at the end of last term.



To do this we developed, tested and launched a custom built mobile application in 3 weeks. Students downloaded the app, filling out information about themselves, such as their faculty and expected year of graduation, and then let it run the background over the study period.  By leveraging uWaterloo's social media presence  as well as via word of mouth, videos, and an informative website, we had 367 students log 382,200 GPS points, which exceeded our goal of 1% participation of the student body.

To communicate results of this study, in the form of maps of campus, I developed an interactive html5 web app (see below or visit site here) that allows users to plot the GPS data in various ways.  This tool allows stakeholders of all technical abilities to engage and use the data to make more informed decisions.

 This "map app" shows how data can be made accessible and actionable to all stakeholders. My inspiration for this was from a project my friend Matt did which allowed a client to design their own suspended ceiling (here).





I'm interested to hear any comments or suggestions!

Processing and Moires

For the course Arc h652- Specifications and Code, we were asked to design a statue backdrop... thanks to Carlo's peer pressure, I used Processing to create a moire effect cedar wall screen.

Based on how easy it was to work parametrically with Processing to generate 3d forms, this seems like a good approach.

I would have liked to write a script to automate the layout and dimensioning of shop and construction drawings for the wall screen... but that will have to happen on some other project.

Cheers,g

Processing and Meshes

I'm using Processing for a few projects right now.

Here is a screenshots of a test I was working on today:

Now time to apply this script to the 380,000 GPS data points collected during the recent uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic App study (see earlier post here).

Geoff

America Revealed - PBS

Similar to Britian from Above but for the USA.

Watch The Dining Galaxy on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Connecting People on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Flight Data on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Flight of the Honey Bee on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Crop Spraying on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Wind Power on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

link to site: http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/

Thanks to Malex for the link.

G

Transit Visualization

Interesting visualization of transit systems.  Mute the video's, the soundtrack is atrocious. 





Andrew Walker is the programmer behind these visualizations and has dozens and dozens of them for various cities around the world (link) He uses GTFS data (General Transit Feed Specification) as the basis for the plots. 

via: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/transit-visualizations/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=wiredscienceclickthru&pid=5563

Smart Geometry

Description:

This simulation is merging 3 things together : tangible table interface, video mapping, and particle system mimicking pedestrian flow. It's purpose is to help with quick assesment of the quality of space for pedestrian movement. This tool allows to use direct manipulation of physical objects in informing real-time simulation, thus visualising the impact of changes immediately. It might simply help to assess natural tendencies in movement of people through space, and to finetune the layout of buildings to allow spontaneous flow. Currently a prototype, still under development.. similar techniques will be used during Smart Geometry 2011 conference in 'Interacting with Cities' cluster. more info on smartgeometry.org Software : openFrameworks, Windows XP Hardware : Kinect sensor, table, DLP projector, laptop

From:

http://smartgeometry.org/index.php?option=com_community&view=videos&task=video&groupid=7&videoid=2&Itemid=0

Programming Update

Working in Processing, with java at the moment.  

Explored/attempted Voronoi Tesselation = unsuccessful. Below is someone else's script:

I've put that aside and now I'm working to implement a first two-dimensional array with identities.   The first dimension will hold location of cell (loc=x+y*i*cellsize), second will hold identity number, or the number of points occurring within a cell. 

From there I will plot the array, in the vein of a heat map:

"A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors"

Fingers crossed...

g

Experiments with Super-Helices

Was messing around with the Processing script I've been making (slowly) to plot GPS points but instead of GPS Latitude-Longitude data I plotted the functions for a helix and super helix:

x =100*(COS(x)+0.5*COS(15*x)+2)
y =100*(SIN(x)+0.5*SIN(15*x)+2)

 The bottom two images had some coding problems, but they look pretty neat also:

Thanks to my brother, Alex, for his help with the equations. 

-gc