Cabspotting

As I am interested in incorporating GPS devices in my project, I started researching virtual platforms that were using GPS as their core layout. I came across this interesting project named Cabspotting. They put GPS in the cabs of San Fransisco and trace their travel throughout the Bay Area. The pattern traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of the city.

The heart of this project is the Cab Tracker. It averages the last four hours of cab routes into a ghostly image, and then draws the routes of ten in-progress cab rides over it. It also has Time Lapse feature that reveals time-varying patterns such as rush hour, traffic jams, holidays and unusual events. Here’s a video that shows coloured patterns of a yellow cab in San Fransisco over a period of three days using the GPS data provided by Cabspotting:

This is exactly what I was looking for to incorporate in my project. Now I need to find out how they did it, the code behind the virtual platform of a mirror world.

~ by Afzal Huda on October 15, 2007.