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My principal interest in mobile applications is to push the boundaries of innovation to create uniquely mobile experiences. I hope my blogs excite and challenge developers to think 'outside the box'.

visualising blogs across time and space

coultonp | 30 May, 2006 21:58

I have been working on a Python application that allows users to create an on-line Blog of text and images from their phone, using location coordinates from a Bluetooth GPS unit ,and ultimately links through to Google maps to produce a representation of their journey. Python proved ideal and it enabled is to create the application very quickly (less than a week) as shown.

 

Having created the system I decided that 2-D (latitude and longditude)didnt really give me a feeling of what happened along the journeys in relation to time so I have been considering how best to represent data associated with both the temporal and spacial information . I came across a technique proposed by a human geographer in which we add time as a third (vertical) dimension as shown.This represents a walk around the campus at Lancaster University and as you can see you get a much richer representation of how I travelled rather than simply were I have been.

 

I would welcome any comments of users experiences trying to represent space-time movements and any other techniques that may have been encountered. I will also post the code to interface to Matlab to produce the 3-D plots if people are interested.

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Re: visualising blogs across time and space

slimpixi | 11/06/2006, 14:51

slimpixi that areal photos is not going to make any sense to anyone non-technical. however if you are able to make it look like a globe and just plot out the points and have those points relate to the post entry--say on a flash map or have it post the info in real time to a flash map app that you put in your sidebar, then it would be really cool. it'd be like you could follow the people's journey. then when you click on the blog point, it would open the blog entry related to that point. but if you didnt click on it, you could just follow the yellow brick road to watch where the blogger is going. my map would be very complicated as i travel all over the world, so a zoomable map would be best with arcs connecting the LAST point of blogging before the plane, to the new point of blogging before the landing, would be good.

study my blog:

www.anina.typepad.com

best,
anina
www.anina.net

Re: visualising blogs across time and space

coultonp | 12/06/2006, 07:43

coultonp Anina

I already have done all that you suggest by linking in the application to google maps if you check out the link http://www.mobileradicals.com/index.php/Mobile_Location_Based_Services#Loco_Blog you will see a trip from the uk to athens. Google maps allows you to zoom in and out and we could follow the journey in real-time as it happened. I may post some more pictures as an example.
The 3-d plot is mainly used for socio-technical studies as it gives a good perspective in relation to time.
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