Public Transport Flows in London: A CASA Movie

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Sometimes in a research lab you step back in awe at some of the research going on around you. The work from the team behind the new Simulacra blog from CASA is one of those moments, visualising the dynamic geography of the urban transport system:

Public Transport flows, London from Joan Serras on Vimeo.

The movie above details the public transport flows of London, it is interesting to note the bus network transition from night to day, the steady ‘pulse’ of the tube network throughout its service and the Stansted-Heathrow-Gatwick connection defined by the coach network.

Take a look at http://simulacra.blogs.casa.ucl.ac.uk/ for full details, including an amazing country wide version.

Wall Mounting iPads in Office Space

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At the moment we are looking into ways to mount 6 iPads in the CASA office, home of digital urban. As part of our 'Analogies' grant we are looking at creating a portable exhibition space of urban research. Building on our recent iPad work on QRator, in association with Digital Humanities, we are looking to create a conversation and twitter system linked to artefacts. However, in the case of Analogies, the artefacts are part of the urban system, looking at flows, networks, simulacra and simulation.

Our first test has been using the PadTab Tablet Mounting System and we are impressed. Using a press on mount it is possible to slide an iPad on and off the wall. In a closed, monitored office space it is a quick and easy solution, the movie below provides more details:




Security is of course an issue when you move to a more public space, but for a first look the PadTab is perfect for the office.

Can a Dodo Tweet?: QRator Museum iPad App Preview

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UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology is reopening on 15 March, allowing some of the rarest extinct animal specimens in the world to be displayed for the first time, but in contrast to the more traditional museum outlook, the new Grant has integrated iPads, QRCodes and twitter into the mix via a project known as QRator.

QRator is an iPad-based system that allows everyone to be a curator and share their views on an exhibition. Visitors can examine an object before leaving their thoughts about it on an iPad to create a digital, ‘living’ label that subsequent visitors can read and respond to. By downloading a free application to an iPhone or android phone, visitors will be able to see rolling updates to the digital label after they leave the museum, or via twitter.

We are horribly biased on this but we think the mix of iPads/QRCodes and Twitter represents a new step in models for interaction in museums. The iPads pull in unique twitter tags from the outside world, allowing the museum objects to be followed and conversations to take place beyond the museums walls.

QRator was developed with the Centre for Digital Humanities (thanks to Claire Ross), UCL Museums and in-house here in CASA (thanks to Steven Gray) with the idea behind digital signage linked to our wider project Tales of Things. The system goes live in beta tomorrow before a formal launch Thursday, we will have full details soon....

The Weeks Media Update

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A quick post with info on how the work of CASA (home of digital urban) has been used and featured in the media this week:

CNN USA and The Discovery Channel both made use of Tweet-o-Meter to demonstrate the use of social media after the earthquake in Japan, including an interview with Steven Gray:

http://www.discoverychannel.ca/Article.aspx?aid=31124 we of course wish the work used in happier circumstances.

Ollie's Cycle Network Map in Wired is now online at:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/start/bike-routes-for-a-city-with-no-tube

Tales of Things was featured on ABC Australia, looking into Mass urbanisation: why do we flock together?

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2011/3153206.htm#transcript

It was described as a mix of Facebook, The Antiques Roadshow and eBay.

QRator (our QRCode Museum interactive signage work in association with The Centre for Digital Humanities) featured on the New Scientist site:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/a-new-lease-of-life-for-extinct-animals.html

Finally, QRator can also been seen on BBC Science with a nice video showing QRator in action:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12711455

To keep up to speed with the latest research, you can follow us on Twitter.

Big Data - The Strata Review from JISC

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Big Data is here, and it changes everything. From startups to the Fortune 500, smart companies are betting on data-driven insight. Strata, a conference organised by O'Reilly was based on three full days of hands-on training, information-rich sessions, and a sponsor pavilion filled with the key players and products. Aimed at bringing together the people, tools, and technologies to make data work the good news is that JISC has written comprehensive report for those who missed it.

The impact that freely available information has had on the learning community is truly profound, with tools like Wikipedia attracting huge audiences (over 365 million readers and growing). We can now access more data than ever – but what do we do with it all? If we want to take full advantage of all this information do we really have the tools we need? And how do we develop these tools in the future?

The internet exerts an unprecedented equalizing force in bringing access to information to everyone on the planet. More information is available (and mainly for free) now than ever before, and yet it is becoming clear that access to information is not enough. The infrastructure to store and share data within sectors is a vital part of the ecosystem, and yet it is often treated as an afterthought. We need a radical change in the way we develop infrastructure in the higher education sector, to ensure that services consumed and funded by the public can do their job as efficiently as possible and at the best possible price.

The research agenda of a university department is closely matched to the skills and goals of the professors and lecturers working in that department. The topics researched in the History department will depend on the specific knowledge and expertise of the History professors at that university. If an external company were to offer to plan their research agenda for them, it would be met with obvious cynicism. And yet the critical tools that these departments rely on are often dismissed as a secondary priority – despite the fact that those very tools define the limits of our ability to explore and learn from the data space that is the foundation of all research.....


You can read the full review (its excellent) over at http://cottagelabs.com/strata-2011-review

Redrawing the Map of Great Britain - a Network of Human Interactions

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Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? We revisit this work in-light of a meeting in a few minutes time....

Coming out of CASA and the MIT Sensable City Lab, the movie below looks at a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions:

Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, the team details how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person's links. They tested the method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain. Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature.

To be honest its worth heading over to the full paper and giving it a read... Carlo Ratti¹, Stanislav Sobolevsky¹, Francesco Calabrese^1*,Clio Andris¹, Jonathan Reades^1,2, Mauro Martino¹, Rob Claxton³, Steven H. Strogatz⁴

1 Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 3 BT Group, Ipswich, United Kingdom, 4 Department of Mathematics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America

Single Timelapsed Photography: City Skyline Day and Night

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Mixing day and night images with the technique in astrophotography known as 'star trails' it is possible to capture a single image detailing both day and night activity. In the photograph below to the left is the moon streaking across the scene and the lights of aircraft at night, to the right is the sun with traffic captured below. Depending on your location the technique can create some interesting timelapse single views photographs, below we detail how to create your own.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals. We used a Go Pro HD camera in timelapse mode, taking a picture every 5 seconds.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.
1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography

Time Taken, 4 to 12 hours to capture, 2 to 6 hours to process.

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 Star/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. If you use a complete day/night sequence then you can create images of stars/activity in a blue sky, as in our first photograph.

You can view higher resolution versions via our Flickr Photostream.

Political Borders Time Lapse Maps

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Admittedly this a slightly niche post for the weekend, but the shifting geographic boundaries in the movie below illustrates how rapidly national borders expand and contract as the result of political moves, social uprising or war:

Germany of course stands out, the movie below provides a closer look at the political borders of Germania from 1789 to 2005




 Back to all things digital and urban in the next post....

CASA Bike Route Map in Wired

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Ollie O'Brien's work of the now widely featured Boris bikes visualisations gain a double page spread in this months Wired magazine.

Image courtesy of Adrian Short

Embedded below is a view of Ollie's work as a timelapse to illustrate the distinctive weekday commuting patterns of the London cycle hire scheme:



You can run the animation direct via the Cycle Hire Dock Visualisation Map, and find out more about Ollie's work at CASA and beyond via his Suprageography blog,

Twitter City Classification: The Mexican Bean Effect

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Over the past few years one of the PhD students I supervise here in CASA has been working on the way cities 'tick'. Fabian Neuhaus is examining the temporal aspects of global cities and the results are interesting.

One recent piece of work that caught our eye was Fabians classification sample of nine cities ordered from evening to morning based on twitter activity. Some cities seem to be more active in the morning and other in the evening. Dubai and Istanbul for example are clearly more active in the late hours, where on the other end Cairo and Bogota are early birds and tweet a lot more in the morning. The US cities Boston and Atlanta have both a peak in the morning and in the evening.

We liked the way Mexico's twitter activity is bean shaped:

Image by urbanTick for NCL / timeRose diagram of 24 hours - showing twitter activity in percentage of total tweets by hour of the day. Covers the cities Cairo, Bogota, Mexico City, Manila, Atlanta ,Boston Los Angeles, Istanbul, Dubai.

Similarly there are preferences regarding the weekdays, not all areas tweet the same day. The early week days, Monday and Tuesday are generally less active than the rest of the week. Manila clearly prefers the weekend, where Cairo, Istanbul and Mexico City prefer the end of the week, Thursday and Friday. Dubai and especially Bogota have the least differences between the weekdays with very similar numbers of tweets through out the week.

For more head over to http://www.urbantick.blogspot.com

Sneak Peak: QRCodes and iPads in The Grant Museum

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Here at University College London, the Grant Museum of Zoology, which contains some of the rarest extinct animal specimens in the world, is to re-open on 15 March, 2011 after an eight-month renovation and moving period. Over the past few months we have been working here in CASA with the nice people over at the Centre for Digital Humanities and UCL Museums to build interactive signage for the exhibits.

Based around the 'Tales of Things' technology, each artefact has a QRCode and Twitter Hash Tag allowing digital conversations to be carried out both inside and outside of the museum space. In typical 'sneak peak' photo mode, below is a look at one of the iPad mounts:

We are not sure why all first look photos are blurred, but such is the case. The project, known as 'QRator' is placing 10 iPads around the museum to explore new models for public engagement and informal learning in museums using handheld mobile devices and new interactive digital labels. The aim is to enable the public to collaborate and discuss museum concepts and object interpretation with museum curators, and academic researchers.

Wired UK has a good article on the Museum with a mention of QRCodes, for a more in depth view of such matters head over to Digital Nerdosaurus.

We will have much more on QRator over coming weeks....