Barclay’s Bikes Data + Processing (Part II)

A more refined visualization of the same data used in the last post. As you can see this video is a demo of an interactive programme which can be downloaded here (32bit or 64bit).

To give a brief explanation, the visual canvas above shows an negative map (from OpenStreetMap) of central London with all the docks of Barclay’s cycle hire as orange dots. The name of the docks represented can be viewed by moving the mouse over the dots. One can view the number of trips made ‘from’ or ‘to’ a dock by selecting the dock by clicking the dot. Pressing the key ‘t’ in the keyboard toggles between the ‘start mode’ and the ‘end mode’. Two or more docks can be selected by dragging a box around them (just like Auto-CAD). Pressing the ‘r’ key deselects all the docks.

The major work here was getting the dock information from the trip data. I solved the problem by creating a array of dock class objects which is grown by serially reading the trip data and adding it to the array after checking if the specific dock is already in the list. The comparison is done through the location co-ordinates to remove any ambiguity caused due to names or ids. Apart from that building interactivity was quite tricky to understand in the beginning.

The video was done by recording a sketch frame by frame as .png images and stitching them up in blender (Thanks to Rex Harby).As usual, I request the readers to give it a try and share the results & problems in the comments section below. Also feel free to put in your suggestions and point out any mistakes.

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