AR and City Data

March 1, 2011

I attended Cognitive Cities in Berlin over the weekend - a great conference with some really good talks and a very informed audience.

I’ve mentioned before I love projects that aggregate data into something actionable, but I’m also a sucker for a good visualization - there were examples of both: Matt Biddulph illustrated how visualizing the frequency of map-tile queries to their servers at Nokia reveals an interest-map of LA:

But one thing that’s apparent to mixed reality folk is we’re really only discussing 2D location based service data right now, and there’s a big opportunity in moving our data models to 3D, where we can interact with it in mixed reality modes where appropriate, generating a spatial 3D “interestingess” map of the city, with much finer granularity - which buildings or facades or objects to people interact with the most, and which of all the spatial data associated with those objects to they prefer to interact with for a given context, and for how long - all this is potentially amazing data.

At the second day a film by Timo Arnell was shown, which using a long-exposure technique similar to the BERG lightpainting to visualize WiFi levels in the city. This also resonates with Matt Biddulph’s presentation:

Not with our normal tools, no. But mobile mixed reality approaches allow us to visualize WiFi strength, or air quality or any spatial data we can acquire and index, giving us a view on the hidden data cloud the city is starting to be enveloped in. Let’s make it a 3D cloud, and let’s visualize it beautifully.