This blog is a research platform organizing projects, examples, and thoughts surrounding the idea of an urban mapping which reads the city as a network of individual activities and relationships in time rather than as a static form. This research looks at the city both from within and from above as kind of urban cat-scan. 


Showing posts with label visualization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label visualization. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

MotionBased Event - Mapping trajectories in extreme sports


What is currently happening is a convergence of video, GPS and the Internet for documentation of extreme sports. These professional athletes want to be able to both map their experiences but also map their performance data. What is possible with the combination of these current technologies is that an athlete can map a personal itinerary before an event, participate in the event, retrieve the data from a GPS device synced with a video camera. That data (video, audio, duration, speed, cadence, heart rate, location, altitude) can be loaded to a website where it can be mapped and analyzed.

see MotionBased event
MotionBased website

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Inversion of Space: Figure of city as traffic flow


One of a series of drawings by Architect Louis Kahn in 1953 of Philadelphia which illustrate the city through the movement, speed, and flow of its vehicles rather than by its physical configuration. Building blocks are simply suggested as a residual space defined via the accumulation of marks which define the traffic flow.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Flight Tracking - a living map of sky activity in the U.S.


To follow the cabspotting post... we move above to the trajectories in the sky . Flight Aware offers realtime (almost - there is a six minutes delay) as well as departure and arrival times, progress along airplane paths, data analysis, discussion groups, pilot itineraries, route analysis, traffic graphs...

mapping of all flight movements in the U.S. during a 24-hour period

mapping of a day (from 4am until midnight) of snapshots of all the radar/radio contact air traffic in US airspace

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Cabspotting - a living map using cabs and gps


In this living map the city of San Francisco is studied via the trajectories of individual cabs moving through the city. The map is created by these multiple itineraries and also analyzed by an array of artists. Social, economical and cultural tendencies of the city begin to become evident. 

Monday, February 18, 2008

A drawing that you can feel / x-ray technology transformed

A PhD candidate in Sweeden has developed a new technology which allows for the virtual touching of organs inside of a human's body while looking at the x-ray image. Haptic tecnology is used here and the computer keyboard is replaced by a "pen-like three-dimensional mouse" which turns the x-ray drawing into a drawing that can be felt.

link to article Fancy a touch of my organs, mate?

B i C i N g - BarCeloNa through the individual trajectories of movING BiCis


This is the project that I am planning for a mapping of Barcelona. For now I am simply posting a photo of the numerous trajectories start points. More later on the plan.

Urban Eyes

"URBAN EYES is a critical design concept combining RFID technology, CCTV cameras and pigeons to create a unique service for urban spaces."

link to Urban Eyes blog

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Nokia and Google Earth - competing in the merging of GPS and Net space

Nokia has announced on Monday in Barcelona that new cell phones were designed to more closely link global positioning systems while Google Maps (their competitor) who also presented a prototype of its own Android operating system for mobile phones.

Both companies understand the importance of how people's location affects how they use Net space. However, Nokia has introduced a device (N96) which allows for videos to be shot on location and to be "geotag" - uploaded with the actual location of collected images into a website not unlike Google's YouTube. Also a new feature focused on directions specifically to pedestrians as opposed to the more common vehicular directions. There is a "walk" feature and an "accelometer" feature for detecting shift of direction. The free internet sharing service "share on Ovi" allows uploading and sharing in a variety of formats in an interactive community similar to Facebook.

According to an article on BusinessWeek.com on 10/1/07, Nokia has also adquired Navteq, a mapping software allowing it to also compete with Google on mapping.

To see most recent BusinessWeek article Nokia and Goole Vie for Mobile Wed Role
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2008/gb20080211_206258.htm

Other articles on Nokia's new cell phone options and their potential mapping possibilities
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/news.aspx?CIaNID=69988

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2259127,00.asp

http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18C12573EB00487884.html?ref=technology

More on recent developments of navigation and mapping devices
http://www.lbszone.com/content/view/2909/2/

http://blog.3g.co.uk/2008/02/htc-p3470-touchscreen-phone-with-gps.html

Monday, February 11, 2008

superABSORBER



An animated and absorbent wall barrier designed by my design studio fieldoffice. The superABSORBER is a new proposal for highway sounds barrier which in addition to absorbing sound pollution will also absorb airborne and light pollution.

This animated diagram done using MAYA conveys the main attributes of the superABSORBER highway wall barrier system. In this project we are using video as a tool to understand the moving forces that affect the design of the wall. 




As an ever changing material, the superABSORBER is affected by the daily rhythms of traffic movement that it mediates and exploits as a cinematic experience. This video shows one of the sides that the superABSORBER interfaces – the highway and the neighborhood by the projection of light across and through its surface. The superABSORBER is enlivened by the passing light of the automobile while mitigating this potentially negative by-product of the roadway into an intimate play of light on the side of the residences.


Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Amsterdam RealTime


A mapping of Amsterdam incorporating public participation

done by Amsterdam's Waag Society in collaboration with Artist Esther Polak (2002)

"Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city's users.



During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam's residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers' data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real people."

http://realtime.waag.org/

Traffic Primers

work by Terraswarm: a series of experiments describing the city via rate, sequence, transition and feedback.

http://www.terraswarm.com/traffic_primer/index.html

Friday, June 01, 2007

Notation A/V



Notation A/V is the original class that I developed and taught at the University of Michigan to explore the possibilities of digital audio and video recorders as tools of notation through which to study the city. This website of the original course presents the assignments developed and student projects which took these readiliy available devices and exploited them, using them as drawing tools.


http://www.clemson.edu/caah/architecture/faculty/skinner/notationav.html

Immersive Mapping and Google

"Immersive's Telemmersion® System is a compact, lightweight, unified camera system. The system generates synchronized, high resolution video streams representing a full-motion spherical world that can be experienced live or in a recorded form."

Immersive Media Corp. signed a contract to license street-level images of North American cities to Google Inc. to create an experience based mapping that you move through. Could this cartography be moving towards the simultaneous representation and reality depicted in Jorge Luis's tale and the Lewis Carroll's tale Sylvie and Bruno?


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070530.RIMMERSIVE30/TPStory/Technology

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070530.wr-immersive0531/BNStory/Technology/home

http://www.investcom.com/feature/imc.php

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Motion Mapping



Motion Mapping is part of an ongoing research on issues of temporality, public space and representation.

Visitors are drawn into a luminous penetrable volume of string in which two small LCD screens presenting student work are embedded. Upon entering visitors quickly disappear into the solid while others already inside suddenly reemerge while interacting with the disappearing and reappearing ghosted projections of the previous users of the space.


The project was inspired by Parallel, an example of Vision in Motion by Moholy-Nagy. In this 1937 photograph by Ryuji Sibata the mosaic pattern of a swimming pool’s bottom in its distortion reveals the movement of a swimmer as it interfaces the body of water.

To view slide show of installation visit
Motion Mapping