
ViziCities Update #2: London Underground in 3D with live trains, and Leap Motion - robhawkes
http://rawk.es/15SiEMw
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emtunc
Awesome - I like the 'depth' feature of the tube network. I assume this data
is also provided by TFL? If so, it is quite good of them to provide so much
data to the public domain.

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petewsmart
The data is all publicly available TFL data. Although a lot of work has gone
into making it all useable. We're hoping to give back and help improve some of
the ways TFL structure their data too

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mcdowall
I noticed that in your post as well just now,

"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.

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cyanbane
Very cool. What % of the platform (if any) would you say is tailored to
London? (ie how easy is it to implement other cities - assuming the
mapping/traffic data is present)

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robhawkes
Thanks! Right now we have some unique aspects per-city due to the way the data
is provided and structured and the fact that we're still prototyping features.

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.

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shanehudson
Is this the first ever map of real time underground? Have been looking for an
android app that does it for ages, so looking forward to this releasing!

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robhawkes
Not first… the 2D map I link to in the post did real-time before us. This is
certainly the first 3D (with depths) real-time tube map that I've seen!

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shanehudson
Ah okay, yeah I have never even seen a diagram of the depths before!

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robhawkes
I don't think many people have! ;)

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rurounijones
awesome, I was getting a bit worried about the lack of updates on their blog.
Thrilled that they are actually talking to various agencies.

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.

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robhawkes
Noticed you updated the comment…

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.

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rurounijones
Yea, sorry about that, I thought I edited it quickly enough that no one will
have read it yet.

My ninja skillz need training.

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robhawkes
We're pretty quick ;)

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pron
We'd like to help. Could you drop us a line: info at paralleluniverse dot co

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dojodonk
Can't wait to see this! When will it launch? Only for London though?

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robhawkes
Glad you're excited about it. We don't have a date yet but we're working hard
to get it out as soon as we feel it's ready. And London to start with, though
we already have plans for other cities (so long as the data exists).

Any suggestions for cities?

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dojodonk
San Fran would be great although any city would be interesting

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robhawkes
We have enough data for SF, it's actually one of the cities we'd like to
implement in the first batch.

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ldng
You should consider Paris. You'll have real height available for the buildings
;-)

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camus
great project , cant wait to test it.

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robhawkes
Thanks! We're looking forward to getting it out there for you to use.

