Location Based Services

»What if a whole city could be seen from above, as if we were looking out from an airplane? Not just buildings and squares, but also city's occupants. We would be able to detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighborhoods are the most crowded, reconstruct commuter-traveling patterns during the course of the day. There could be all sorts of new services for the benefit of the public, from emergency planning to traffic control, from the efficient allocation of utilities to assessing the impact of new city infrastructures.«   (taken from course description in PlusOnline).

Durig the semester we were working in a group of four and we had to develop an application example for a location-based service considering the topic "City Dynamics" based on telecommunication data from Amsterdam, covering the Summer 2010. We decided to focus on the football world championship in South Africa as the Dutch team made it to the finals and we wanted to have a look at the public viewing areas in the city of Amsterdam before, during and after the games. The overall result should be a map of telecommunication traffic in the course of time.


Visualizing City Dynamics

Final


What does this animation reveal?

This animation shows the city center of amsterdam during the football world cup final in 2010. The final took place in Johannesburg, but the Dutch team made it into the final and therefore the public viewing areas were crowded with football-fans. Within our group, we started to work on a simulation which would demostrate the telecom activity within 13 hours of that day. Every polygon represents the area of influence of one antenna. The colors of the polygons represent the activity. Blue colors refer to low activity and yellow or reddish colors are a sign for higher activity. The simulation starts at 15:00 and ends at 03:00 in the night. The first slide gives an impression of a quite normal state. There is higher activity in the city-center and relative low activity in the outer disctricts. In the eveneing the traffic concentrates on the public viewing areas in the city center.