It didn't take long to take the lessons from the Underground visualisation and apply it to other types of transportation, in this case "live" London buses along the real road network topology.

This was long before anything like Bus Open Data Service (BODS) existed!

HD: https://vimeo.com/90420682

Though I still think the disco train is one of my favourites. I still haven't done a proper visualisation using trains and carriages yet!

Once I discovered the world of air traffic data I was hooked. There was no going back.

I was (well, still am) particularly interested in the movement of individual vehicles, like this aircraft landing at Heathrow airport in ViziCities.

Though it's the visualisation of movement over time that I find myself being pulled back to again and again.

There's something fascinating about seeing the patterns that emerge in complex movement data once you visualise and animate it over time.

For example, I was surprised to clearly see the moment that Heathrow airport switched runways in the following visualisation.

I knew the data contained that moment, though for some reason I hadn't expected it to be so visually prominent.

More recently I explored animated air traffic data using different tools, such as using iTowns to overlay data on a beautiful globe with atmospheric rendering.

Exploring the use of non-Web visualisation tools for movement visualisation has also been an interest recently.

For example, visualising air traffic data using Unreal Engine. The potential in visual quality is unmatched.

If was to pick a favourite air traffic visualisation it would be this one showing how aircraft avoid thunderstorms in the US.

It was one of those rare cases where a random hunch turned into something much more interesting.

Blog & HD: https://spatialawareness.io/blog/thunderbolts-and-lightning/

Fast forward to a recent timeline and I've been re-exploring bus data thanks to better data sources like
Bus Open Data Service (BODS).

For example, visualising the actual movement of individual London buses along real road network topology.

And most recently, exploring the movement of wind as a contextual aid for visualising renewable power generation.

If I had to guess I'd say 90% of the visualisations I've worked on have included movement in some way.

I'm just fascinated by the visualisation of "invisible" data that's just waiting to show you all sorts of cool patterns and insight once animated over time.

Watch this space.

On a related note, I'd be curious to hear whether you'd want to see more of these threaded deep-dives or if you'd prefer me to stick to individual posts.

I'll probably post threads regardless, but if there's a big preference one way or the other it will give me some insight into how to space them out and generally balance things on here.

@robhawkes I like threads! I’m still learning this website but I think it’s considered best practice to mark only the first post in a thread as Public, and the rest as Unlisted.

At least in my iOS client (Toot) this can be set as the default.