data visualization Archives - Digital Urban

Colours: A Live London Weather Dashboard

Andy — Thu, 23 May 2013 06:05:51 +0000

Here at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis we run a Davis Vantage Pro 2 unit with Solar and UV sensors from a rooftop on Tottenham Court Road. The current output is via our live ‘Weather Dials‘ page, which is all singing and dancing, complete with graphs and updates every 2 seconds. Sometimes however there is a need for something simpler, a dashboard style view that changes background colour to a variety of pantone shades according to temperature:

Colours – London Live Weather

Made with a tablet in mind and to hang on a wall, ‘Colours’ is designed to be a simple weather application for London at a glance, data updates every two seconds.

Backgrounds

Thanks go to Ollie from CASA for the background script and the NounProject (Adam Whitcroft) for the icons.
View it live at http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/weather/colours.html

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The London Data Table

Andy — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:54:00 +0000

As regular readers will know we recently held a one day conference here at CASA entitled Smart Cities, Bridging the Physical and Digital. As part of the conference Steven Gray and George MacKerron built various exhibition pieces, including the London Data Table. Created in the shape of Greater London, the table had various visualisations projected onto its surface; from live aircraft positions, live traffic and bike hire usage to movies of public transport over 24 hours.

Steven, over on his Big Data Blog has written a write up on the logistics behind the build – How big do we make the table? Can we find a projector with a short enough throw to project to the table? How were we going to mount the projector etc….

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ABM, SketchUp, ArcGIS and Lumion

Andy — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:37:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime rendering, rapid visualisation and 3D exhibition spaces.

Regular readers will know we have been exploring Unity due its interactive nature and ability to import various file types into its game engine (see Particles, Agents and Emergent Behaviour ). Unity is still an option but for rapid visualisation Lumion also offers distinct possibilities. The movie below details our first draft example of building an exhibition space (SketchUp), retexturing and adding various crowd/delegate models (3DMax) and the Twitter map (ArcGIS) using Lumion:

If Lumion offered a stand alone viewer rather than purely movie based output then it would be our engine of choice. As such it is currently a weigh up between Lumion and Unity, our Unity example is under development, we will post it soon as we can…

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London Twitter Data as a Landscape

Andy — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:04:00 +0000

Readers will know that as part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitter API and using the resulting .csv file as an input into a variety of software, including Processing and ArcMap. Data so far has been focused on displaying the output from ArcGIS as a slightly more traditional map, albeit in 3D via Lumion:

Taking a step back it is possible to take a more abstract view of the data visualisation and use the Twitter data collected to create a digital elevation model for direct landscape visualisations.

As we have mentioned in previous posts there are of course many arguments on the pro’s and con’s of visualising data in such a way, indeed the visualisation is developed to open up the debate as part of the MRes course allowing various visualisation techniques to be compared from the same data set.

Sometimes however an abstract route to visualising data can quite liberating in a world of visualisation dominated by more traditional and academic output, the screenshot above illustrates Kingston Peak with Soho Mountain dominating the background. The movie below details the landscape as a fly-through:

In future posts we will explore issues of scale as we take the landscape and move it into an online exhibition space.

Update – see Data Space: Agent Based Models, SketchUp, Visualisation, ArcGIS and Lumion for the exhibition space developments…

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A Photoshop for Graphs – Introducing Gephi

Andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:19:00 +0000

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:

Introducing Gephi 0.7 from gephi on Vimeo.

Gephi runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free, whats not to like…

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A Photoshop for Graphs – Introducing Gephi

Andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:19:00 +0000

Introducing Gephi 0.7 from gephi on Vimeo.

Gephi runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free, whats not to like…

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Steam Punk Beta Tweet-O-Meter

Andy — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:38:00 +0000

As regular readers will know our Tweet-o-Meter features tweets per minute within a 30km area of New York, London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Barcelona, Oslo, Tokyo, Toronto, Rome, Moscow and Sydney.

Ben Blundell, here at CASA, has taken some time off from our TOTeM project and has hooked up a series of panel meters to the script via a custom arduino module. The result is a suitably ‘steam punk’ version of Tweets per minute in New York, London and Paris. We would of hooked up Munich but ran out of meters:

Analog Tweet-O-Meter from Benjamin Blundell on Vimeo.

All it needs now is a brass case and an ‘on/off’ handle…

Currently in beta and part of our wider ‘Ask’ tool it allows anyone to ‘mine’ data from Twitter or carry out a survey of either the world, a continent, a nation, a city or a local area. In short, we think it has notable potential for social science and the analysis of trends and relationships in a variety of areas.

We have run various beta tests on data collection with the main mining process starting next week over a 24 hour period. We aim to collect all tweets with a geo-location tag in the above cities, this is a large amount of data allowing various social, spatial and temporal analysis to be carried out.

The system is under development here at CASA as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project being coded by Steven Gray in association with Urban Tick, currently carrying out analysis on the data sampled so far.

See http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/ to view the Tweet-o-Meter, we should have some early analysis soon and graphs for the cities within the next day or so. For those too young or perhaps simply nostalgic for the late 70’s/early 80’s hit that inspired the work, here is PopMusik via YouTube (its great…).

Thanks go to Ben and Steven for their work on this – see Bens http://www.section9.co.uk/, and Stevens http://stevenjamesgray.com/ for more info on their work both inside and outside of CASA time. Thanks also go to Russ Garrett (russ.garrett.co.uk/) and the London Hackspace for help with the code.

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Data Visualisation: Budgets and Good Morning Twitter

Andy — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:53:00 +0000

If like us you are often trying to find interesting new ways to visualise data then a quick look at the collection on Vimeo can lead to many lost hours.

One excellent example is of British Columbia’s budget update by blprnt:

BC Budget Visualization Tool from blprnt on Vimeo.

blpnt seems to have quite a talent for visualisation, below is his work regarding people saying good morning on twitter:

GoodMorning! First Render from blprnt on Vimeo.

The movie details approximately 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying ‘good morning’ in English as well as several other languages. It was built in Processing (processing.org) using Twitter4J, and a home-brewed client for MetaCarta’s geo-parsing APIs.

It is well worth a visit to the blog – blog.blprnt.com, excellent stuff…

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GPS Visualisation: Urban Art and Urban Cycles

Andy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:46:00 +0000

Urban cycle studies are the science of everyday life, they focus on the daily routine of the city with its habits and rhythms as they occur in most citizens’ lifes. It is the power of the normal that brings stability and the routine that ensures security with the cycles dynamic flow and continuation that keeps the city ticking. This is from urbantick.blogspot.com who are looking into the life of the city.

As part of the research they are compiling a list of ways to visualise GPS data, complete with software links. Below is one such example, using GPS to create urban art:

GPS Art from gallo1 on Vimeo.