ViziCities Update #2: London Underground in 3D with live trains, and Leap Motion
rawk.es
rawk.es
"What you can see here is the result of many hours of work from Pete and I, ranging from programming time, to nearly giving up trying to understand the algorithms involved, to hours spent manually wrestling with Excel spreadsheets containing the data we needed. Let's just say that the world would be a better place if data was offered in a variety of similar, usable formats."
I'm leading the project on exactly that, our new Beta site is built upon the new API my team have been building (common data model, RESTful, lower latency etc). Ping me over a mail and we can get you involved in the beta API.
Eventually, we plan to move to an abstracted approach using consistent data formats that means we can spin up a new city without any modifications to the platform.
I am a bit worried about the attention given to "shiny" (Leap Motion, Twitter, vehicles etc.) features rather than actually useful statistical stuff but I am hoping they are just working on this while they are in discussions with said agencies.
Re: "Shiny". We're working on a huge number of different features and we didn't want to overload the latest update with things we'd already covered in the first update – things like statistical data visualisation, etc. We're still working on those areas though and they are still a priority, they just don't need as much work as the other features right now.
My ninja skillz need training.
So far, I've only seen overexcitment for a simple web-based viewer that displays very few data layers for a specific city and lacks a lot of useful information: for instance there are no POIs / streets labels / ... In this regard, I believe the recently unveiled WebGL-based Maps / Earth from Google are significantly more advanced. Most of the focus of your project has been on visual cuteness (tilt shift, animated cars) and wow effect (leap motion). This is combined with using buzzwords that IMHO don't really apply here (big data, platform). I'll be glad to be proven completely wrong when your beta is out.
Even when Google Maps came out, it was nevertheless showing useful mapping information and not only background data layers. In this respect, it was not a shiny toy.
My point is that the current prototype for ViziCities is focusing almost exclusively on visual appeal, at the expense of mapping accuracy / actual usefulness / advanced interactivity.
Any suggestions for cities?