Context is a major theme of technology today. Every app and device is wondering how they can personalize the experience to the user. Today, every wearable and app collects user data, and with sensors it is now easy for users to track their lives. Collecting location data enables apps and devices to infer the context of the user’s behavior and travel patterns. The collection of location data is not only incredibly useful information, but also makes for some pretty amazing visuals.
Here are the 4 coolest location data map visualizations:
1. Popular running routes
These maps show the most popular running routes in 20 major cities from The Washington Post. As the number of smartphone apps that allow you to track your running, biking and other physical activity have surged, so has the amount of data available about how and where people exercise. Nathan Yau, who runs the blog Flowing Data, used some of that data to create a series of beautiful minimalist maps. Using data from the app RunKeeper, Yau has mapped the routes people run most often in 20 major cities around the U.S. and the world.
Read more / see the full visualization here.
2. The Most Popular Biking Paths
Strava labs recently released a global heatmap of 77,688,848 rides and 19,660,163 runs from the Strava dataset. The map now contains 160 million activities and 375,000,000,000 points.
Read more here and see the global heatmap here.
3. Wi-Fi Access Point Visualizations
Skyhook uses a billion Wi-Fi access points and cell tower antennas to get you an accurate location on your phone when you need it. Putting all of those points on a map makes some beautiful pictures. We work with Mapbox to make this easy and awesome.
New York
Read more / see more visualizations here.
4. Luminous Cities
Flickr also has a great portfolio of precisely geolocated data, and a map makes a wonderful way to browse photos. The color scheme in this interactive lends to the theme of city lights, or maybe camera flashes going off.
See more visualizations here.
