yesterday, I guess for no reason, I started working on this visualization called myVillage&ITP. I am trying to visualize and also generate some kind of artsy piece out of where the people of ITP spend their time most often, and how they would walk to this place and come back to ITP.
The idea is, you go and click to a place that you have been. The guy in the application goes to that point and turns back to ITP on the google map screen shot, leaving a trace behind. I am going to put it on the floor to collect real data, but till then, here are some screen shots with random points clicked, and the emergence of the patterns through out time (shown without the map).
Just a beautiful side of visualizations, it was very interesting for me to see that the auto-random-wandering guy never crosses Greene Street and Mercer Street. First, I though it was some kind of bug, but then I figured out that, seriously, we don’t need to cross these two streets since the places one would go from ITP are either below or above these two streets; we never need to cross these streets if we are turning back to ITP.
In fact, creating the algorithm for the guy to find its way through the streets to reach its destination had been quite tricky, and kept me awake till 5am this morning (oops, daylight saving time.. so I guess it was 6am when I was in bed). But simply, the algorithm is:
the boy (boy.class) checks the adjacent corners and its own corner to see which corner is closer to the destination point
if it is the corner he is currently at
go to destination point directly
if it is not/if an adjacent corner is closer
go to that corner
I loved this piece, and trying to get it work as an applet on the webpage. Then it will be up for you guys to try.