The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
After three years, this is my final day on the Talisman project as I start on the Future Cities Catapult project on October 1st. If you go back through the blog posts, all the project highlights are there, including all the builds, conferences, worksho…
Continue reading »Following on from my last post on running agent based models in MapTube using AgentScript, I’ve now got my “live” tube animation working: I’ve speeded up the trains by a factor of 10 so you can see them move, but otherwise, it’s just a modification of the coffeescript code I was using before on a …
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ModelTube is the name of the project to integrate agent based modelling into MapTube. Back at the end of last year I did a blog post on how to integrate AgentScript with Google Maps: http://www.geotalisman.org/2013/12/18/bugs-on-a-map/. Following on from this, I used the AgentScript agent based modelling framework, which is based on NetLogo, to visualise the tube …
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I’ve been experimenting with 3D buildings in my virtual globe project and it’s now progressed to the point where I can demonstrate it working with dynamically loaded content. The following YouTube clip shows the buildings for London, along with the Thames. I didn’t have the real heights, so buildings are extruded up by a random …
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The pigeon sim visited the LonCon3 72nd World Science Fiction convention at the ExCeL centre last week. The event covered Thursday 14th to Monday 18th, with the weekend looking like the best part as lots of people were dressed up as science fiction characters. On the Friday shift we did get Thor on the pigeon …
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Following on from my last post about level of detail and Earth spheroids, here is the NASA Blue Marble texture applied to the Earth: The top level texture is the older composite Blue Marble which shows blue oceans and a very well-defined North Pole ice sheet. Once the view zooms in, all subsequent levels of …
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The algorithms required to build virtual worlds like Google Earth and World Wind are really fascinating, but building a virtual world containing real-time city data is something that hasn’t yet been fully explored. Following on from the Smart Cities presentation in Oxford two weeks ago, I’ve taken the agent-based London Underground simulation and made some …
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As you can see from the image below, we spent three days at the NCRM Research Methods Festival in Oxford (#RMF14) last week. In addition to our presentations in the “Researching the City” session on the Wednesday morning, we were also running a Smart Cities exhibition throughout the festival showcasing how the research has been …
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The image above is the position of all the tubes at 09:47 this morning, 29th April 2014. As I was walking into work though, I was looking at the licence numbers of all the old Routemaster buses that TfL had put on as extra services. It’s a bus spotter’s paradise out there with all the …
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I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the tools available to visualise the tube, bus and train data I’ve been collecting, so I’ve ended up creating my own. If you’re wondering why some of the lines don’t have any tubes in the above diagram, it’s because I’ve got the speed set very high and I’m not …
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I blame whoever printed out the Sierpinski triangle wikipedia page on Friday, but I’ve always been interested geometry, so I had to have a go at building one. The title of this post is a reference to the fact that this type of procedural geometry is often used in benchmarking 3D graphics systems as it …
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As an update to the last post, I’ve put the agent script model of the live tube trains on the web. This shows the “nearly” live positions of all tube trains in London. One warning though, you need to reload the page to refresh the data. I wasn’t planning on releasing this just yet, so …
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Tubes running up to 10am on 5 February 2014, during the first day of the tube strike The graph above is a stacked area chart showing the number of tubes running on each of the London Underground lines. The width of the coloured part represents the number of tubes (i.e. 150 is the total number …
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Following on from my previous posts on AgentScript and Google Maps, I’ve fixed the performance problem when zooming in and built a model of the London Underground to play with: An AgentScript model of the London Underground using data for 27 January 2014 at 15:42:00 I’m not going to include the modified code here as …
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Maybe I’ve been staring at agent based models running on Google Maps for too long, but it does look as though the map is infested with bugs which are crawling all over it. Have a look at the animation below: This is a Talisman deliverable, which we’ve called “ModelTube”, as the general idea is to …
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It can’t have escaped most people’s attention that the recent release of Internet Explorer 11 contains support for WebGL (IE11 Dev Center). Now that advanced 3D graphics are becoming possible on all platforms, visualisations like the Realtime 3D Tube Trains that I posted about a while ago are likely to become mainstream. On a similar theme, …
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The image above shows the latest attempt at producing a real-time moving visualisation of the whole of London’s transport system. The tube lines are visible with the darker areas showing the locations of the actual tube trains. These are really too small to see at this resolution as I’ve zoomed out to show all the …
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The Census 2011 boundary files for the OA, LSOA and MSOA geographies have just been added to the MapTube tile server, so it’s now possible to make maps from the new Census data. The following is the first example using the population density table: MapTube showing population density (people per hectare) from the 2011 …
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It’s been hot in London today, as you can see from the temperature data, obtained from the Met Office Datapoint site: Air Temperature for 16:00 BST (local time). Full map available at: http://www.maptube.org/map.aspx?mapid=1276 What isn’t immediately apparent is that the temperature in London was around 30C from mid-morning until the evening and the sustained temperatures …
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I’ve been working on the infrastructure to deliver real time data to a web page running WebGL for a while. The results below show locations of all tube trains in London as reported by the TfL Trackernet API. 3D visualisation of London tube trains using the Trackernet API at 14:20 on Monday 24 June 2013 …
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It’s been very quiet over Easter and I’ve been meaning to look at 3D visualisation of geographic data for a while. The aim is to build a framework for visualising all the real-time data we have for London without using Google Earth, Bing Maps or World Wind. The reason for doing this is to build …
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The idea of cities mirroring computer operating systems has been around for a while (see: http://teamhelsinki.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/city-as-operating-system.html ), but recent events have made me wonder whether this might be about to become more important. Cities are systems in exactly the same way that complex computer systems are, although how cities function is a black box. Despite that …
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My last post on the Census Maps got as far as running a simple comparison of every combination of every possible map at LSOA level to obtain a similarity metric. There are 2,558 possible variables that can be mapped, so my dataset contains 6,543,364 lines. I’ve used the graph from the last post to set …
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I noticed recently that the NOMIS site has a page with a bulk upload of the latest release of the 2011 Census Data: http://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/bulk/r2_2 As one of the Talisman aims is to be able to able to handle data in datastores seamlessly, I modified the code that we used to mine the London Datastore and applied …
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Following on from the Hex Bug Spiders that we were running at Leeds City Museum, I have modified our third spider to use an XBee module for wireless control via a laptop using the 802.15.4 protocol for mesh networks. This gives me a two way channel to the spider, so we can now add sensors …
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My last post on the delays caused by the snow contained a comment about a bug in the D3 library. Not wanting to just leave this, I’ve done some more testing with the latest D3 code. As can be seen from the graph below, something corrupts the x coordinate in the SVG path: On …
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With the recent snow in London, we’ve been looking at real-time sources of transport data with a view to measuring performance. The latest idea was to use flight arrivals and departures from Heathrow, Gatwick and City to measure what effect snow had on operations. The data for Heathrow is shown below: Arrivals and departures data …
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Over the last few weeks I’ve been building systems to collect realtime city data including tubes, buses, trains, air pollution, weather data and airport arrivals/departures. Initially this is all transport related, but the idea is to build up our knowledge of how a city evolves over the course of a day, or even a week, …
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We had the first snow of the Winter in London this morning, around 07:30 and lasting no more than half an hour. I’ve been building the data layer for the iPad video wall, so switched the National Rail data collection on once I got to work around 09:50. The idea was to collect data to …
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As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, CASA and Leeds University held a three day event at Leeds City museum called “Smart Cities: Bridging the Physical and Digital”. This took place on the 8th, 9th and 10th of November. The museum’s central arena venue for the exhibition was a fantastic choice because of …
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Following on from my previous post about controlling the Hex Bug spiders from a computer, I’ve added a computer vision system using a cheap web cam to allow them to be tracked. The web cam that I’m using is a Logitech C270, but mainly because it was the cheapest one in the shop (£10). I’ve …
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For the Smart Cities exhibition in Leeds in a couple of weeks, we’ve been building a physical representation of an agent based simulation. Hex Bug Spiders are relatively cheap hexapod robots that are controlled via an infra-red transmitter which has an A or B code so that you can control two simultaneously. The way it walks …
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Having collected large amounts of data on tubes, trains and buses over the Olympics period using the ANTS library, the first thing I’ve looked at is to plot the total number of tubes running every day. The two graphs below show the number of tubes by line and the total number of tubes running for …
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I’ve described this as “radar for trains”, but it now also includes a real-time view of bus and tube delays. The idea is to produce a single visualisation highlighting where there are problems with the transport system: Status of London’s transport system at 13:00 on 8 August 2012. The green squares are bus stops showing …
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This was something I came across while trying to calculate expected waiting times for tubes and buses. I’ve collected several months’ worth of transport data and wanted to calculate the mean and variance of waiting times at every station and platform. This can be achieved in a few hours for the tube, but there are … Read more →
Continue reading »As part of the on-going ANTS project (Adaptive Networks for Complex Transport Systems) we’ve been tracking how many London buses are running during today’s bus strike. This is a very new development which we only just got working in time, so we don’t have any baseline data to compare against yet, but the two maps … Read more →
Continue reading »The TfL Countdown API for buses was released a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been experimenting with it for the ANTS project so that we can add real-time bus tracking to the Tube, River Services and National Rail libraries. The ultimate aim of the ANTS project is to show how failures affect multi-modal flows, … Read more →
Continue reading »Last Saturday, 5 May 2012, saw the FA Cup Final and various Olympics preparation events taking place in London, so I couldn’t help wondering was was going to happen to the transport system. The ANTS project (Adaptive Networks for complex Transport Systems) that I’ve been working on is designed as a toolkit for collecting transport … Read more →
Continue reading »It is four years today since MapTube was launched at the Barbican and to mark this event, I’ve made some changes to how the home page displays. This is a bit of an experiment, but I’ve tried to make the home page display topical data by using RSS feeds from the BBC News page, the … Read more →
Continue reading »The purpose of my previous post on the TransXChange timetable data was to make it possible to track National Rail trains in real time. Due to the large number of stations making up the network and the fact that you can’t obtain information for a whole line in one go, the only viable option is … Read more →
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