Aaron Koblin, whom I met at Boris‘ house for the speakers dinner of Picnic 2008, is someone whom I deeply respect. His latest work, visualzing the flight patterns of NY, shows what he does best: making sense of large amounts of data sets in a very elegant way. Two million flights pass through New York’s airspace each year. Aaron Koblin used images from his piece, Flight Patterns, to create a Google map representing air traffic across the United States over a 24-hour period. The map displays the flight paths for more than 205,000 aircraft the FAA tracked on August 12, 2008. Using data provided by FlightView, a service that provides real-time air-travel information, Koblin layers flight patterns by altitude, aircraft model and manufacturer. Check out the Wired article here to browse through the map.
One of the reasons why I like Koblin is that no matter how pretty his data visualizations look like, the visualizations always show relations that would otherwise have been easily dismissed.
A few months ago, Aaron Koblin used data provided by KPN (a big Dutch telecommunications company), to visualize the amounts of text messages being sent during New Years Eve. As you can see, you can see the ‘pulses’ of city of Amsterdam derived from the amount of sms’ sent. Using processing and OpenGL, the data is transformed to something more meaningful:
Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve from Aaron on Vimeo.
