We are proud to announce that the 'Internet of Things' project we have been itching to blog about is set to launch mid April. The project is funded out of a digital economy sandpit with the technology developed by ourselves here at CASA, UCL and led by Edinburgh College of Arts, working with Brunel, Dundee and Salford Universities.
Termed 'Tales of Things' it is a possible game changer, cant say much more than that at the moment but if you want updates and to be first in when we launch, follow us on twitter - http://twitter.com/TalesofThings.
Just imagine every object holding a read/write memory and linking it to everything else. We will be talking about the project with a lecture entitled the 'Geography of Everything' at the free CASA Conference in London, April 13th. There are still a few places left so register soon if you want to hear about the project.
We are always wary of any description text that states 'one of the most interesting things you'll watch all day' but it is actually a really neat movie and product, so we'll let the marketing department off this time - flutter:
Written in Adobe Flex, the application mashes up ESRI's ArcGIS Online mapping services with some of the most popular media feeds available today: Twitter, Flickr, & YouTube. The music leaves us waiting to see 'Matt' as it seems to the same track used in http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/ which kind of takes the focus away just a little bit.
The last 12 months have seen the release of vast amounts of publicly available data, which has led to a bit of conundrum on how to easily visualise complex networks. What is needed is a 'Photoshop for Graphs' which is exactly what Gephi is. In short, Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs - the movie is great:
When taking panoramas or just general images, removing artifacts such as lens flare or unwanted objects to often a painful process. The clip below provides a sneek peak at a new tool known as 'context-aware fill' to automate the process. Watch to the end of the clip as the panoramic and desert sections are a must see:
In short this will make many photographers and panoramic artists jobs a lot quicker in future, thanks go to Steven Grey for sending this in.
A few weeks ago we did an interview with Mike Parker for Radio 4, entitled 'Social Mapping' you can listen to it on Thursday March 25th, 15:45 via BBC Radio 4.
Self-confessed map addict Mike Parker explores modern cartography.
There's no more effective way of representing our lives than a map: social and political conditions, health trends and the movements of goods and ideas have far greater impact when they're plotted in multicoloured cartography. Mike asks how society is now being analysed online in cartographic mash-ups and crowd-sourced data. He also discovers how mapping the human condition, its needs and habits, its highs and its lows, goes back to way before the digital age.
Over the last few weeks we have been kicking about with some books on 'Processing' the open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. We have been reading them with a number of thoughts in mind, one of which is the visualisation of GPS tracks. The people behind Spatial Nodes have done some good work, the movie below shows the tracks of 8 people in Amsterdam:
UrbanTick has also started looking into the technique with their first clip based around the UrbanDiary project, recorded between April and August 2009:
If you want to do these yourself a good start is to take a look at http://www.learningprocessing.com/ Daniels book at the site is one of the best tutorial books we have read in a while.
Also, Visualizing Data by Ben Fry is a good second step, link this with an Arduino Unit and things begin to get interesting in terms of the possibilities for interaction and visualistion of the urban environment.
We will have more on linking Ardunio, Processing and general visualisation in future posts.
Below is a virtual tour of the City District in Moscow with a focus on the Mirax Federation Tower:
The Federation Tower is a skyscraper currently under construction as part of the Moscow International Business Center. Construction of the towers began in 2003 and is ongoing - see the Wiki page for full details.
An update movie on our data collection via Twitter in association with urbantick. The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.
The movie clip uses Google Earth to visualise the data:
We like the integration of the digital into the model footage, especially with the traffic. That said, the pixelated faces of the workers in the background is perhaps slightly concerning, especially for a clip to be used in an exhibition.
Building design by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture; video direction and production by Brooklyn Digital. Music by Mouse on Mars (via O.M.A.).
Hopefully we are about to dive back into the Unity game engine for a truly exciting project, as such the glimpse of Unity 3 opens up a number of possibilities:
Regular readers will know we have been logging data in 12 cities via our Tweet-o-Meter, its still early days but the results for a weekend in London are intriguing.
The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.
In terms of density the focus is on central London with local hotspots as the weekend progresses, around Kings Cross and Old Street. There is also a noticable trace along the main transport routes into and out of town, noting that we seem to be tweeting while on the move. The clip below details the visualisation in Google Earth:
The clip reveals a message cloud rising and hovering above London as a time-space aquarium where the time is plotted as the height information. Interestingly Google Earth is becoming the visualiser of choice for such data sets, the combination of location, imagery with the ability to view by time makes it a formidable engine for data visualisation.
Thanks go to urbantick who converted the data via a custom VB script.
Using our recent tutorial on image stacking it is possible to stack images from both day and night to create a single image of the city skyline over time. The photograph below consists of 8400 images taken using a Go Pro HD with one image every 5 seconds. The streak of light to the left is the moon during the night time sequence, while the right hand light is the daytime sun. The small lights are aircraft during the evening:
You can view a higher resolution version on our Flickr Stream, we will have more on the Go Pro HD next week, including a tutorial to create 24 hour+ timelapses.
Last week we covered creating 'day trails' in Photoshop using the technique in Astrophotography known as 'star trails'. Today we take the same technique and use it to create a view of city activity at night.
Time Taken, 4 to 12 hours to capture, 2 to 6 hours to process.
Setting Up
The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 5 seconds pointing at the skyline of London. Capturing an image at least every 5 seconds is vital for star/aircraft trails as it allows for closer spacing between the lights in the final image.
We left the camera running for approximately 12 hours capturing 8000+ images, saved into a folder on our computer. Ours captured covered both day and night time, resulting in the following timelapse:
The next step is to open up photoshop, chose the images you want to use, and start stacking.
Image Stacking in Photoshop
The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:
1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.
2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.
3) In Photoshop click 'File', 'Automate' and 'Batch'. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select 'None' for the output directory.
Click 'Ok' and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an 2 hours to stack the images - resulting in the Start/Aircraft Trail' below:
The line across the centre is a star and the bright line on the left is the moon coming into shot. The rest of the lights are aircraft in the sky above London.
