Monday, November 10, 2008

Air Travel Visualisation

Was sent this visualisation of World Air Travel over 24 hours today by a colleague at QUT. Each particle represents a plane in transit over the 24 hour period. I like the following about this visualisation:
  • Particles at this scale naturally clump together highlighting the major areas of air travel.
  • Integration with a world daylight representation provides a suitably visually orthogonal set of representations for easy spatial comparison of time of day and air travel intensity.
  • Air travel is seen as an aggregated daily process across the world.
  • Aesthetically it is pleasing - ugly visualisations are beyond contempt.
  • It also brings home - if air travel is postively correlated with economic activity - why the US still strongly influences the world economy.

Ross

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