animation | urbantick

Rendevous – History of the Universe

By: admin_urbantick

04-11-2011

The Murf by the band Rendevous is the electronic soundtrack to the universe. Not on its own but together with the stunning illustration by Scott Benson. Together it makes a music video of the very inspiring sort.

It is inspiring technically and of course visually. Still, even though there is a whole story told in the animation the sound is not pushed in to the background, the two elements perfectly join up to one great piece of entertainment.

The Randevous album can be bought on iTunes HERE. They also feature the music video there and some additional stuff.

London aNCL

By: admin_urbantick

24-08-2011

Uncategorised

London was the first city we collected Twitter data for when we started to create the New City Landscape (NCL) project, monitoring location based Twitter activity in urban areas. This was back in May 2010 and since we have collected data for a lot more cities from around the world.

We have now finally also an animated NCL (aNCL) version using the same dataset. This part of the project was only developed earlier this year in collaboration with Anders Johansson at CASA and we are trying to catch up on the different cities we have data for. A series of aNCL visualisations has already been realised.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Showing four screenshots taken from the aNCL visualisation for a weeks worth of Tweets in and around London. The timings are midnight, morning, afternoon and evening. Each do is a tweet, re-tweets show a lin between sender and re-sender.

There are only very few features we are using for these visualisations. A characteristic landscape feature to roughly describe the urban area and the 30 km collection radius parameter to provide scale. Other than that there are only the individual Twitter messages that were collected over the period of one week. THe animation superimposes all seven days in to 24 hours.

With the visualisation we are highlighting the way information disseminates through re-tweeting of messages. An RT message will show a thin yellow line between original sender and re-sender. The information travels at some speed, which is based on the time it takes between sending and resending.

London, even though the data is already a year old is compared to other cities a very busy place in Twitter terms. We have a lot of individual messages, but more interesting there are quite a lot of different interactions happening simultaneously. Where as other cities don’t show a lot of interaction, in London the sharing of information is quite an important part of tweeting. An interactive, but static activity map can be found at London NCL.

Its great to see how London wakes up between 07h30 and 09h00 in the morning after a moderat night. Then there is however, not very much sharing at this point of the day. Only after lunch and especially later in the afternoon the sharing really starts in London. It is almost as if the city was to digest the information it had created earlier in the day, reprocessing it and passing it on.

Barcelona New City Landscape

By: admin_urbantick

22-07-2011

Uncategorised

Barcelona is in terms of twitter activity one of the cities that has a strong central core of high activity. Very similar to for example the London NCL or the Paris NCL maps.
The highest point is just over the Placa de Catalonia with a steep slope down la Rambla to the Roca Columbus. Other places of high activity are around the parliament, here the ‘Monte di Parliament Catalonia’ and around the Olympic centre on Montjuic.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Barcelona New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Barcelona.

The Barcelona New City Landscape map has already been published earlier, but it needed an update because of some problems in the processing and labeling. This new version also goes in line with the adjusted layout and design.

Thanks for the help with the map go to Narcis Sastre, who kindly worked it through.

Barcelona New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Barcelona New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

Barcelona is very active in the afternoon hours. There is a peak around 15h00, 18h00 and 21h00, after which it quickly drops off. The mornings are very pronounced right after six, however overall far less than the afternoon. Over lunch there is clearly a dip with lesser activity.

Spanish is clearly the dominating language, followed by English. Indonesian, French, Portuguese and Italian are sort of the runner ups. ALso Esperanto is there, this is surprisingly often present in the top ten list and it seems that a lot of people are using it as a statement, since it is not really a spoken language.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Barcelona is a afternoon city with more activity between three and nine than through out the rest of the day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

Also, we have the animation ready for the Barcelona data set. This one is put together in collaboration with Anders Johanson. The animation also shows the interaction between the users based on RT and @ tweets with thin yellow lines. This indicates a direction and provides a sense for the distribution of flows.

San Francisco is Busy – aNCL Series

By: admin_urbantick

06-04-2011

Uncategorised

San Francisco is busy tweeting and this new animation of location based tweets in the Bay Area show actually how busy it is. Geo located tweets are shown as yellow circles that fade away by time, and re-tweets are shown as small yellow points moving onto a line connecting the location of the original tweet and the geo location of the re-tweeter.

The data used is the same as for the San Francisco New City Landscape (NCL) map. Where a virtual landscape was generated from the tweets. More details HERE. This new animated version shows in detail how the different centres ebb and flow as time passes. There are distinct characteristics between the location over times of the day. Basically the Bay bridge keeps it all together.

Interestingly the RT’s are a very specific day thing. During the night this information channel is not ver active and people seem to be busy tweeting their own stuff. In a sense this could be hinting at a more formal and business use of the RT function.

This animation is developed in collaboratively Anders Johansson and urbanTick. The data was collected using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter tool, coded by Steven Gray, in association with DigitalUrban.

There is more to come. We will be working our way through the NCL data collection of over 70 cities from around the world. Within the next week will be posting the next city to continue this aNCL (animated New City Landscape) series.

Stop Motion on the Road

By: admin_urbantick

06-04-2011

Uncategorised

A really nice clip using stop motion to capture the action on the pavement outside the house. The skaters are loose and hit the card bord ramps. It is in the same manner as the earlier stop motion ‘Sorry I’m Late‘ also with a rather urban interpretation of skating. It is really one for the screens though. Nevertheless the tricks are impressing.

Twitter Wave in Honolulu

By: admin_urbantick

17-03-2011

Uncategorised

The tsunami wave, generated by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake of the East coast of Japan on the 11 March 2011, spread through out the pacific threatening many coastal sections in different countries. The water fore strongest hit the Japanese coast shortly after the earthquake. All other countries had a little more time to evacuate and prepare. Hawaii, was one of the next destinations in the line of the wave. The arrival was expected by NOAA, the tsunami warning centre, around 13h17 the same day.

Looking at the activity on twitter during the tsunami we are on the search for clues about the relationship between twitter and an unfolding natural disaster. As an inspiration to serves the XKCD PhD comic ‘Seismic Waves‘.

In this close look at twitter activity related to the tsunami resulting from the earthquake, Anders Johanson has animated the messages for one hour before and one hour after the expected arrival time of the tsunami wave in Honolulu on Hawaii. The messages are collected through the usual NCL collection method and are focusing on actual geo located tweets that contain lat/long information. Johanson explains “At the time instant when each new tweet is posted, a bright red blob appears on the map, and this blob is then decaying in intensity and size. Re-tweets are shown as an arrow, pointing from the original source of information. Interestingly enough, the information wave has the same direction as the seismic wave. However, there are obviously way too few data points to enable a rigorous spatio-temporal analysis in this case.”

IMage by urbanTick for NCL / The graph shows the number of geo located tweets sent per hour from Honolulu, on 2011-03-11, in a radius of 30 km on the day the tsunami resulting from the earlier earthquake in Japan was expected to reach the Hawaiian coast. In white are the overal tweets and in purple the tweets containing the key words wave, tsunami and earthquake or Japan. The first dotted line from the left is the expected arrival time of the wave on the coast of Hawaii at around 13h07 UTC. The second dotted line is the arrival time of the wave on the coast of Mexico.

The tsunami arrived in Hawaii and hit hard, causing damages estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. On the twitter scape on the other hand, there is a slight increase of activity after the wave, but actually very little. However, as you can note in the graph above there are more tweets using the keywords related to the natural disaster unfolding than there are thereafter, especially after the wave arrived in Mexico.

——
UPDATE 2011-03-18
——

Processing the twitter data some further, the spikes on the keywords do fade out nicely in the hours afterwards. This time we are working with the larger data set containing all the located tweets including the geo located tweets. This data set differs from the one used earlier as that it included reverse geocoded locations, eg places, but not necessarily pure lat/long messages. This set contains some 260’000 messages as compared to some 20’000 geo located in the earlier dataset.

Looking at the event over longer period shows the pattern much clearer. There is a lot more activity around the expected tsunami wave and the dying out of the keywords can be observed in the following hours and days. However it also confirms that to some extend the purely geo located tweets, as a sub set, folow largely the same pattern and are not

Note, there is a baseline tweet containing the term ‘wave’ that we picked up as part of the collection. This is a weather boy just of Honolulu tweeting the current status of the water, wave and wind.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The graph shows the number of geo located tweets sent per hour from Honolulu after 2011-03-11, in a radius of 30 km on the day the tsunami resulting from the earlier earthquake in Japan was expected to reach the Hawaiian coast. In white are the overal tweets and in purple the tweets containing the key words wave, tsunami, earthquake or Japan. The first dotted line from the left is the expected arrival time of the wave on the coast of Hawaii at around 13h07 UTC. The second dotted line is the arrival time of the wave on the coast of Mexico.

Water Cycle – What Comes Around Goes Around

By: admin_urbantick

21-02-2011

Uncategorised

Talking cycles and repetition, this is probably the most prominent example everybody remembers from primary school, the water cycle. The rain comes down over the mountains filters through the stone, a spring, a creek, a river, a stream into the ocean, where it is picked up by clouds, ferries to the mountains.

A fairly romantic picture, but definitely a basic diagram explaining connection. Also it servers very well as a starting point for questions. For example for a six year old, why is the water salty in the ocean, but not the rain? How does the water know the way to the ocean? And why are the couds not drifting of to the moon?

This could go on and on developing into a full blown session on earthly systems, but it is all about the basic idea of a systemic concept. It is not about what happens it is more about what happens with it.

So or an ad explaining what a water supplier company does, this is a gold one, back to school.

Sorry I’m late

By: admin_urbantick

11-02-2011

Uncategorised

A lovely timelapse movie on an all too familiar subject, being on time. This involves sometimes quite an effort to make it thought the wilderness of everyday street life scenes and manage the different modes of transport accordingly.

In this story directed by Tomas Mankovsky the guy does quite a number of stunts to get there. Some more details can be fond on the movie page including some making of shots, to the angles right, testing the frame rates and movement of the actors and of course the casting.

Image taken from Sorry-Im-late.com / The story board, simple but precise, see movie. Click for larger version.

Worldwide Twitter Traffic

By: admin_urbantick

15-12-2010

Uncategorised

Twitter communications span the globe and the pinpointing of end locations of conversations in this animation shows how the network spans around the planet. It jumps between the hot spots of cities and even continents.
In the description of the project the authors discuss the rather interesting point of the meaning of ‘Location in the case of twitter. In fact this not only applies to twitter but many location based services, the here is not always here. “‘Location’ has 2 meanings in the world of Twitter. It can mean (1) where someone was when they tweeted provided they are using a GPS-enabled smartphone, or (2) where someone lives (users can specify their home location).” (Geography 970)

In a second version the locations were mapped on a rotating globe which give a good impressionof how we communicate around an axis. For details please see Geography 970.

Drift – Morphing City

By: admin_urbantick

22-11-2010

Uncategorised

The ever changing perspective as we navigate the urban landscape is an important feature influencing the perception and in many ways influences how the space we create as we go along are experienced. It’s not as if the street is existing, but it is renewed every time as a recreation of itself with a specific take.

Buildings feature in this process consciously as a back drop and the immediate focus is put on the objects whizzing about, to avoid potential collisions. The trajectories of these has to be continuously monitored and one’s own path adjusted accordingly. It is a sort of negotiation between the elements that make use of their power to take decisions and with it continuously generate situations.

However, this consuming activity might in the long run is not be the main focus. Unconsciously the main focus might lay on the static frame and the defining elements as parameters of the room for action.

In this beautiful time lapse Theo Tagholm shows an interpretation of this spatiality of places from the perspective of one subject.

As it says in the description “I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to.”
The clip is produced by Theo Tagholm, a video artist. He’s got some other great video work. As linked here earlier with the clip Still Moving.

— urbantick

Rendevous – History of the Universe

London aNCL

Barcelona New City Landscape

San Francisco is Busy – aNCL Series

Stop Motion on the Road

Twitter Wave in Honolulu

Water Cycle – What Comes Around Goes Around

Sorry I’m late

Worldwide Twitter Traffic

Drift – Morphing City

About

Archives

Categories

BlogRoll