We have been seeing a couple of beautiful interactive maps in the past few days. After Twitter visualized billions of geotagged tweets on interactive 3D maps, Nokia’s new project ‘Living Cities’ artfully portrays traffic in five cities around the world including Mumbai on its Here Maps.
Nokia’s Here team in collaboration with cloud-based mapping analysts CartoDB visualize how traffic looks in a time-lapsed manner over a period of 24 hours. The team anonymously collected data from connected Nokia smartphones in London, Rome, Chicago, Helinski and Mumbai for over a month and portrayed them on interactive maps.
In Mumbai, for example, the teams collected data from over 18 million people and 1.8 million vehicles covering 1,900km of roads in a month. The Maps themselves are quite artfully made, with the entire page slightly changing colors to depict the time of the day and show the traffic as white dots. Not surprisingly during noon and night, the white dots are scarce, while during mornings and evenings you can hardly see the roads under the continuous flow of traffic.
Nokia has developed these maps as an example for developers to take advantage of Nokia’s mapping technology and come up with new and innovative ideas. Such maps could show users roads that are clogged, or have easy flowing traffic or roads that have been closed all in real-time.
You can head over to the LivingCities webpage to experience these maps for yourself.
