Watch London in real time: tweets, tubes, etc. | Hacker News Reader

Watch London in real time: tweets, tubes, etc.

wearedata.watchdogs.com

96 pointsvjvj39 comments

What an amazing site to build as a companion to a video game. Can anyone explain if this is somehow integral to the game itself?

It's related to the game's story. In the game, Chicago is interconnected with a computer system that allows one to control city infrastructure and eavesdrop on people. I guess the site is showcasing the eavesdropping part, in a case of life imitates art.

Surely it's already art imitating life, just because they've then looked backwards and shown the life example that's similar to the art it doesn't make it life imitating art?

So one of the sources listed is http://opencellid.de/ and there are similar services for the other countries tracking mobile phones.

Can anyone familiar with this explain how this type of service is possible?

From my limited understanding, it seems like these services all track / utilize cell phone base stations, which I understand to essentially be the device that connects you to the network. But how do they identify the positions of all of the mobile devices utilizing each station? Is this something that is openly broadcasted by the base stations?

The OpenCellID data is collected by volunteers via smartphone apps.

The location of the phones on the map is where they were when they reported the base station.

The maps on the OP's posting only show the location of cell base stations, not the positions of mobile devices. There is more of them than you realise...

It appears to be broken rather than "amazing" for me in 3 different browsers on 2 OSs.

"click on the map or on a blue symbol ..."

Clicking on the map does nothing and there are no blue symbols shown.

Works in Chrome for me. In firefox I got a blank screen, then an 'easyXDM' window popped up with some logging data in it. Strange.

Today with the same browser, there is stuff that wasn't there yesterday: blue symbols, the outlines of boroughs, click through, the works. Most likely their servers were choking under the load yesterday and failing to supply many of the data sets.

Works fine on Windows 8.1 with Chrome 35.

By far the most interesting thing is the overlay of map with tweets. I'm using a cinema display, so can't say I have problems reading small type. Although the color scheme looks very Blade Runner, it makes overlaying only a few options difficult to grok. Scrolling is slow.

Still impressed this was rolled out for a video game. Have there been any other presentations like this in the past?

Do tweets have location data attached to them?

> Users must opt-in to use the Tweeting With Location feature (turn location "on").

https://dev.twitter.com/terms/geo-developer-guidelines

Interesting. Why would anyone do that?

Because a location often adds context? You can turn it on/off very easily on a tweeet-by-tweet basis.

I find it especially helpful to add location when posting a photo of some landmark or public event. I wouldn't tag tweets by location when I'm at home, but if I'm out it's a neat way to complement the tweet.

300% CPU Usage...

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4702MQ CPU @ 2.20GHz

Interesting data aggregation, but impossible to use without a supercomputer.

Seems to work fine on my i5 win7 Lenovo T430 "nothing special, off the shelf workhorse" laptop

Loads on an iPad 2 Safari and the crashes the browser shortly after a city is selected.

Same on Chrome on current Android

Is this data gathered by the Watch_Dogs companion app for mobile devices, I wonder?

You can find the data sources in the footer - http://imgur.com/QknNS6B

If the companion app also feeds in, cue the obligatory "OMG SURVEILLANCE HAS GONE TOO FAR" remarks.

Amazing, How was this coded?

Looks like it's done in Flash. Still very impressive but would have been even cooler if it was all JS/webgl/canvas voodoo. Would love to know where they're getting some of the data from (e.g. the bikes and atm locations).

[edit] For sources, hit Legals in the bottom right footer, then Sources - Credit in the top (as per http://imgur.com/QknNS6B) [/edit]

Not sure about the other cities, but for London, the bike locations are probably coming from the GLA Datastore http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/package/tfl-cycle-hire-l.... ATM information perhaps through Mastercard's API? http://www.programmableweb.com/api/mastercard-atm-locations

I saw this a while back and thought it was a brilliantly executed marketing campaign.

On a side note, whatever happened to Ingress?

I have a few friends playing it actively so I don't think anything happened. I keep getting update emails as well.

Are you sure that they are not just faking the data?

Hmm, if they are, they're elaborately faking to the extent of making up sources in the footer. I'll take a look tonight if there is a CCTV camera where they claim there is and let you know!

Well, this explains why it's performing reasonably well.

year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6001799

Why does this eat up all my CPU?

it's flash after all

working on something similar for chicago with a bit less load time: citypulse.io

where does the data come from? OpenStreetMap?

pretty amazing

Splash screen, loading screen, Adobe Flash, microscopic typefaces. Feel like I went through a time warp to 2001.

Also does not work at all on Chrome for Mac.

It works fine on my MaChrome. And I got the same '00s feeling.

Let out a "what year is this" comment myself when the flash player started loading.

I was able to get it running on Chrome 35/Mavericks, but now that it's loaded I'm not sure what I'm suppose to do... I can see old tweets and their location in relation to ATMs or traffic lights? Woo?

All the visual twitching - busy, busy, busy - makes me feel like I'm looking at someone's migraine.

Worked fine on Chrome for Mac here, but instantly redlined my i7.

It looks amazing but getting data from a twitter mainstream with geolocalized tweets as other social data as well is not difficult to implement. In my opinion the key is how to create that map from scratch.

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