Eric Fischer has created an awesome map using Flickr data to highlight differences in how tourists and locals inhabit New York City:
Tourists and locals share an uneasy detente at times on New York’s crowded streets. When it comes to photography, however, there’s evidence that these two tribes dwell in different cities.
Eric Fischer, a 37-year-old computer programmer from Oakland, Calif., created a map using geotagging data on the photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa to plot the points in New York(and 71 other cities) captured by shutterbugs. He then devised an ingenious system for separating tourists from locals. A user with many shots of the same city taken over a wide range of dates is deemed to be a local, and marked on the map with blue dots. Tourists get a red dot. (Yellow dots could not be placed in either camp).
If you’ve ever wondered what New York would look like inside a NES game, Brett Camper has the answer with 8-Bit NYC. He aims to create maps for other major cities with a little help from the crowd over at kickstarter.
I don’t think I’m alone in using Google Streetview to check out places I’d like to travel to (like the New Orleans Garden District, Paris or Hawaii). It has to be some of the best armchair traveling out there, as close as you can get to walking down a street and checking things out without actually being there.
Cool on its own, there could be other ways to integrate this:
* Integration of Google Streetview within a site that was location-focused, like Summit on the Summit, scavenger hunts, travel-related, etc.
* Using Google Streetview to encourage armchair traveling. Show cool locations to explore within Streetview, offer suggestions along the way.
* Streetview of any event our client was involved in (may take a partnership with Google and would only be suitable for certain kinds of events, like music festivals etc)
Internet users in Turkey are protesting against web censorship laws in their country by staging a ‘virtual protest walk’ on Google maps in Istanbul Taksim Square. They are aiming to walk to the parliament house in Akara, pixel by pixel. Using Google docs ‘anyone can edit’ function, protesters are able to edit the document and put her or himself on the map in support of the cause.
The Digital Universe Atlas is billed as the most complete fourth-dimensional map of our universe. It was developed by the American Museum of Natural History in cooperation with NASA and contains everything from the Himalayas to the edge of the observable universe. While that might sound like a lot, watching the video reveals it isn’t.
Apart from being a nice example of information visualization, one commenter sums up its usefulness nicely with “…several hours of heated discussion versus 6:31min infovis.”
Ebay uses it’s data to visualize online transactions made on their site on Black Friday in this interactive map. Neat!
“Every minute, every second, every nanosecond — someone’s taking advantage of eBay to find that special item they love. Others use eBay to sell great stuff. It’s a match made in shopping heaven.”
A demonstration of Google Maps Navigation (Beta), an internet-connected GPS navigation system that provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps on Android 2.0 phones.
Interesting driving community + site developed by Michelin/Martin Agency which they’re calling ‘an online gathering place for those who live for the thrill of the drive.
‘The Nation of GO combines Google Maps with our own mobile mapping application to make plotting your favorite roads and trails easy,”
Accompanying the new site will be the social networking-oriented Nation of GO Tour, which will travel the U.S. to drive consumer awareness and encourage participation. Consumers and dealers can follow the tour online by visiting the NationofGO.com site, the Nation of GO Tour blog (blog.nationofgo.com), Twitter (twitter.com/nationofgo) and YouTube (youtube.com/nationofgo). (via: Tire Review)
Friends & Family AR locator demo by Chris Hughes – using the iPhone 3GS and data from AT&T’s FamilyMap to locate family members. Loopt should get on this.
The Hidden Park is an innovative iPhone app/game made for kids and parents to play together outdoors.
To play the game, you start by downloading the app from the App store, and then go out to a nearby park to play the game.
The list of parks you can choose from include nine major cities from NY, London to Tokyo, Sydney. (The developers plan on adding more parks in the future.)
You then follow a GPS map of the park and tackle puzzles and challenges along the way – like fighting magical creatures in order to save the park from being overrun by developers.
What I love about this game is that it takes kids outdoors and lets them interact with their environment in an interesting and engaging way. It also makes gaming more social, since they’re physically walking around playing the game with their parents — instead of sitting in front of a TV.
The game also teaches kids the importance of preserving their local parks and wildlife, in a cool and interesting way.
By using the iPhone’s speedy A-GPS feature, The Hidden Park is able to accurately pinpoint each player’s movements within the park and plot this against the interactive map that forms the heart of the game.
Through Location Based Services (LBS) technology, the game triggers particular animations and tasks as the user reaches key waypoints along their journey.
The Accelerometer is an inbuilt feature that allows the iPhone’s display to respond accordingly to any physical motion of the handset. In the case of The Hidden Park, this feature has been used interactively for when photos are taken of the player during the game.
After a photo is taken, you shake the iPhone to activate the Accelerometer, which scatters the mystical characters over the top of the image.
