GPS drawing | urbantick

Drawing New York

By: admin_urbantick

20-06-2011

Nike is one of the very big brands managing to cleverly connect to their customers through both very good marketing and a product range always catching and inspiring the trends. So they were very early to offer an iPod extension to connect their sport equipment with a lifestyle gadget.

Since these early days of the Nike iPod marriage a lot has changed, but the basics are stil, you can listen to your favorite music and mange your training data. Nike+ offers a platform for managing the training data based on distance, pace and route and track performance over time. It also comes as an app for the iPhone including the GPS tracking.

Image taken from cargoCollective / The 1000 runs of New York as a sample of Nike+ training data. The activity data redraws the geography of Manhattan including many of the streets.

Cooper Smith, a interaction designer, worked with a 1000 runs taken from the Nike+ data store and produced a series of amazing graphics focusing on New York. What he is working with is really the GPS tracks and the contained time and location data. He has been using the Google Refine for data cleaning and processing for the visualisations.

The data nicely draws out the geography of New York, especially Manhattan and shows a runners map of NY of sort. It is an individuals map with a collective presentation of spatial activity. Different patterns are showing as Smith is experimenting with different visualisation and processing parameters.

Image taken from cargoCollective / Smith explains the distance parameters: “Not surprisingly, longer runs tended to be more prevalent in areas that runners could get to stretches of uninterrupted running trails, such as Central Park, the bridges, and the West Side Highway. Landlocked areas where trails are replaced by streets tended to see much shorter runs. I was surprised to see that most of the runs originating from the Upper East Side and Upper West Side were short runs, given their proximity to Central Park. It appears that people who begin their runs in Central Park tend to go for longer runs, while those who start outside of Central Park and run into it tend to go for shorter runs”.

The full animation of the data shows the patterns over a 24 hour period, superimposing the tracks in time. There seems to be more activity after work, but already in the morning is quite a peak. Nevertheless NY seems to be running all day. At least this was the picture back in autumn 2010.

London 365- 2010 – One Year of GPS Tracking

By: admin_urbantick

16-11-2010

Uncategorised

It is one more year since the last summary of personal tracking was posted. This year it is a consistant 405 tracking record as compared to a mixed device record the previous year. This matters in so far as the 405 performs very well and the data processing job is a simpler for the cleaning part. The down side is that it is slower for the processing part since there are very detailed records with loads of points. THe previeous year can be found at Plymouth365 and oneYearLND_2009.

Image by urbanTick / London overview of the 2010 GPS track record. A one year drawing of movement on a daily basis, recording all activities and trips. For a large version click HERE.

The map also shows the previous year in green, since there is a striking similarity and in order to highlight the differences this seemed to make sense. The similarity goes as far as the two records being more or less the same. I expected a similarity, but not to this extend.

There are differences only on a very small scale. There is one major change in routine that dominates the differences between the two years. My son has started school and the trips to the nursery near the work place have been substituted by trip to drop of or pick him up at the school near our home. This changes the spatial practice and with it the pattern. However it is not as obvious since the directions of movement stayed more or less the same.

Image by urbanTick / London Bloomsbury zoom of the 2010 GPS track record. A one year drawing of movement on a daily basis, recording all activities and trips.

To update the zoom in to the leisure area around Regents Park here is an updated version showing the different visits to ZSL. In 2010 there appear definitely a shift in interest focus. Never been to Australia this year.

As pointed out in last years post, the capacity to recall events using the lines as memory triggers works very well. I can basically over the whole year piece together my steps. Being this for example in the bottom left corner some of these trips to the Natural History Museum, Royal Geographical Society or in Hyde Part visits the Diana Memorial.

Image by urbanTick / London Regents Park zoom of the 2010 GPS track record. A one year drawing of movement on a daily basis, recording all activities and trips.

Draw your Landscape

By: admin_urbantick

09-07-2010

Uncategorised

A new GPS drawing project by Jeremy Wood (earlier on uT with the dog drawings and the dragon) has hit the online news. A contextual landscape map drawn by walking the landscape and tracing it with a GPS. Couldn’t be more simple as engadget points out: “walk around in the defined area with a GPS unit and end up with a 1:1 scale map of where he walked.”
The concept is very similar to Open Street Map (OSM). Take a GPS and with the recordings you can trace landscape features, OSM traces the streets and a visualisation of the data collected produces a map.
However Wood’s approach is interesting in so far as that he attempts to already process the landscape features in regards to the output map by using the trace to mimic mapping symbols. This provides an enhanced readability of the outcome.
Did he actually climb over fences and invade peoples gardens to achieve this? The map covers the Campus of the University of Warwick with some 238 miles of path over 17 days. Wood recalls: “Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.” More images on the artists page.

Image by Jeremy Wood taken from GPSdrawing.com / Traverse Me is a map drawn by walking across campus with a GPS device to invite the viewer to see a different landscape to that which surrounds them. It questions the possibilities of where they are and inspires a personal reading of their movements and explorations of the campus. Commissioned by the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre.

Tanks for the link to Ralph Barthel, via engadget and infosthetics.

Tracking the Void in Amsterdam

By: admin_urbantick

21-12-2009

Uncategorised

A tracking project based in amsterdam has produces a really nice visualisation of the GPS log data. A couple of people tracking themselves on their daily commutes presumably with a igotU GPS device.
The visualisation is done in processing.
It is amazing how quickly the structure of Amsterdam becomes visible. Compared to the London UrbanDiary map here in Amsterdam a much clearer urban structure shows. This is probably down to a number of factors, for example the urban morphology is fundamentally different between Amsterdam and London and the mode of transport is probably similarly different. A lot more bicycle transport, which makes for a more divers picture, than by using public transport or even traveling underground with the tube.
But because of this is makes for a really nice visual comparison between the two.

Tracks in the void from Steven M. Ottens on Vimeo.

Tracking the Void in Amsterdam

By: admin_urbantick

21-12-2009

Uncategorised

A tracking project based in amsterdam has produced a really nice visualisation of the GPS log data. A couple of people tracking themselves on their daily commutes presumably with a igotU GPS device.
The visualisation is done in processing.
It is amazing how quickly the structure of Amsterdam becomes visible. Compared to the London UrbanDiary map here in Amsterdam a much clearer urban structure shows. This is probably down to a number of factors, for example the urban morphology is fundamentally different between Amsterdam and London and the mode of transport is probably similarly different. A lot more bicycle transport, which makes for a more divers picture, than by using public transport or even traveling underground with the tube.
But because of this is makes for a really nice visual comparison between the two.

Tracks in the void from Steven M. Ottens on Vimeo.

London 365 – One Year of GPS Tracks in London

By: admin_urbantick

04-09-2009

Uncategorised

It is already one year that I am in London this month. So it is time to look back at my personal track record and see where I have been. Of course this goes in comparison with last years 365PLY – One Year Plymouth.
It is the same time span, but the amount of data has increased dramatically due to the use of the new device. Plymouth has been recorded with the Garmin Foretrex 201, whereas London has been partially collected with the Garmin Forerunner 405. The 405 records about a third more points, meaning that the data volume is at around 150’000 location points compared to only 60’000 in Plymouth.
The drawing that appears on top of the London urban fabric is my interaction with the urban fabric by finding my way. Interesting how it acts as a memory trigger. By following the line I can bring up images in my mind about what happened there.
Interesting that I have only been on the north side of the river. There are visits to the Tate Modern, Waterloo Train Station or the South Bank, but that’s about it. Already in my previous London record the pattern was very much the same. Traveling between Kentish Town and Bloomsbury. By looking at the collection and comparing it to Greater London, I haven’t exactly managed to see the whole lot. But I don’t remember my year as been boring at all.
It is more or less the same pattern that also has shown up in the UrbanDiary records, although they are recorded over the period of two month only. This longer period suggests that the emerging pattern is rather stable.

Image by UrbanTick – click on the image for full resolution version.

Just updated the map, I have to confess that I missed part of the beginning dating late 2008. Other than me probably no one would have noticed anyway, because it is really hard to spot what is what.
There are some particular interesting areas on the map. One is Regents Park and London ZOO. I have been quite often to ZSL and those visits draw like this.

London365_ZSL_090909xs.JP9rbWGvoZou.jpg
Image by UrbanTick – ZoomIn London Zoo ZSL

Dog Drawing

By: admin_urbantick

16-06-2009

Uncategorised

A series of video tracking clips by Jeremy Wood. Great visualz, but not sure how it is done and processed. It sais GPS but it looks more like video tracking…

by Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor

Dog Drawing from Jeremy Wood on Vimeo.

Jeremy Wood is working with GPS for a long time and on his website GPSdrawing.com he shows an extensive archive of his personal records and works using GPS. There are some great drawings and writing to be checked out.

PastedGraphic.OspwLKVvo2jD.jpg
Image by Jeremy Wood – Location: N51° 52′ 14.3″ W3° 27′ 36.4″ Brecon Beacons (2.1 km SW from Pen Y Fan), Wales
Time: 16/07/02 (09:41:07-10:29:14), Track Length: 4.169 km, Average speed: 3.5 kph, Method: Foot
I lost the fight to finish the off the dragon in the time available, it remains half emerged from the side of a hill.

BMW Advertisement – GPS Drawing

By: admin_urbantick

03-05-2009

Uncategorised

BMW is at the moment very active and innovative at the advertisement front. For their new motorbike series F650 they have created a sequence of four clips in witch not the bike itself, but what one can do with it features. And what can you do with a bike, you ride it! But BMW goes a step further and extends the meaning of riding. You can also use it to draw or even write. This is where the GPS come in to play. For long this has been hobby for amateur artists and gadget geeks, but now it suddenly jumped on to the big canvas of the billboards, GPS drawing!
What BMW not says in the GPS model used, we don’t even get to know if GPS is installed on these bikes.

BMW Unstoppable GPS Drawing from Max Rider on Vimeo.

BMW Scissors GPS Drawing from Max Rider on Vimeo.

BMW Boat GPS Drawing from Max Rider on Vimeo.

The first two clips are shot in Montevideo, Uruguay. Featuring motorcycle globe rider Sebastian Klein and the new BMW F650GS. The last of the three is from Cabo Polonio, Uruguay. Featuring professional motorcycle rider Dirk Thelen-Farber and the new BMW F800GS.
BMW further invites every, presumably BMW, bike rider to contribute and upload their map to the BMW-bike page.
The latest examples are mainly just tracked routes from enthusiastic, but riding rather than drawing oriented user. But all the tracks can be downloaded as GPX and reuses, in case you want to redraw the scissors, write the unstoppable or draw the boat, the links will take you there. In addition there is also a bridge and gertcoetzee has drawn a motor bike.

BMW has also been quite innovative with its latest add for the all new Z4, this time a car. The story of the campaign is to use the car as a paintbrush and presumably the road as the canvas. Similar to the bike drawings, but this time not with GPS but with real colour on a real enormous canvas. The innovative use of technology here is that they use augumented reality and allow the potential buyer to interact with the product before even seen or bought. Great stuff.

And then you can drive it for yourself with the help of your printer and the built in camera.
The new BMW Z4 in 3D from tristan and laura on Vimeo.

— urbantick

Drawing New York

London 365- 2010 – One Year of GPS Tracking

Draw your Landscape

Tracking the Void in Amsterdam

Tracking the Void in Amsterdam

London 365 – One Year of GPS Tracks in London

Dog Drawing

BMW Advertisement – GPS Drawing

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