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Visualization as Animation: FAA Traffic Patterns

I've been looking at a lot of visualizations lately to get an idea of both what's possible and what's effective for looking at large volumes of information. A couple weeks ago I came across Aaron Koblin's site. He generated a series of animated visualizations of air traffic over the US based on FAA flight data. Pictured is an image showing traffic volumes over time. From his site:

The following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya and the final piece was highlighted at SIGGRAPH 2005 in the NVIDIA Immersive Dome Experience.

The visual impact of seeing all those planes in the air (up to 19,000 at one time) is amazing. Beautiful movies at his site. Be sure to check out the Celestial Mechanics videos as well.

Posted by Mark Tuesday, November 22, 2005 9:04:00 AM | permalink |