

Human data shows how we move in cities - pveugen
http://cities.human.co

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_mulder_
Perhaps the decay times on the trails is too long, but I can't really detect
any patterns here, other than that people seem to walk, run, cycle and drive
down roads. After a few mins, all this seems to do is highlight the road
structure of a city. A shorter trail decay would highlight the people
commuting and show activity for transport type by time of day.

Another interesting metric would be to adjust brightness based on length of
journey.

~~~
pveugen
Good point. I played around with different decay times a lot, but it was very
hard to settle on a decay time and opacity settings that worked for most
cities, since the data set from city to city was varying in size. If I would
re-render the movies, I'd definitely do try renders with lower decay times,
especially for cities like NY, LA, etc.

~~~
saraid216
It might be interesting to see whether or not an ideal decay time correlates
with anything.

~~~
mahesh_rm
Using a wavelet time frequency analysis is what they generally do to highlight
these kinds of patterns when dealing with brain activations of neural
populations. It gives you an idea of power of a specific frequency over time
[e.g., [http://www.lauriefrick.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/wavlet...](http://www.lauriefrick.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/wavlet_coherence_HRV_Amschler2.jpg)]. And apparently
it's already been used for analogous purposes: [ [http://www.paramics-
online.com/downloads/technicaldocs/wavel...](http://www.paramics-
online.com/downloads/technicaldocs/wavelet_transforms_tec09.pdf)] :-)

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blocktuw
Any chance at open sourcing the data? There are other cities that would be
interesting to see that are not included in your sample. Are you interested in
licensing out use of the data to 3rd parties? So much data!

~~~
pveugen
No concrete plans yet. We never share any personal identifiable data, without
explicit consent of our users. So if we would like to make (parts) of our data
publicly available, we have to anonymize and aggregate that data first. For
now we're focused on our app first.

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swimfar
Strava, a run/bike tracking app, released something similar with their data.

[http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#3/-56.00000/50.00000/blue/bo...](http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#3/-56.00000/50.00000/blue/both)

~~~
maxerickson
HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687900)

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viraptor
This reminded me of a fragment from Cryptonomicon about collecting history of
elevation of people walking around the city and trying to reconstruct a street
map from it. While an interesting exercise, we just carry precise position
beacons with us these days.

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Aldo_MX
I'm from Mexico City, and I'm genuinely surprised by the biking activity.

Unfortunately, only in the touristic areas, and near the "Ecobici" routes,
there are bike-exclusive lanes. On the other side, drivers feel entitled to
use the streets exclusively, and they perceive bikers as a hindrance in their
way.

I wanted to commute by bike to my work, but at the end I gave up, because I
didn't want to get hit by a car and risk my life like hardcore bikers do.

~~~
pveugen
Our tracking accuracy overal is good, but slow motorized transport versus bike
rides have the highest error rates. That means that in a small percentage of
the cases slow, bumpy car rides might get detected as biking and the other way
around. Movement patterns vary quite a bit from city to city, especially for
public transport. Users can correct detection errors, but that doesn't catch
all cases. We have a slight bias towards cycling.

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entropyie
At least in Dublin, it seems to confuse Biking with Sailing (see north of Dun
Laoghaire pier)

Otherwise very cool!

~~~
pveugen
Sharp. Thanks! In some cases we mix up (slow) motorized transport and cycling.
We only categorize walking, cycling, running, active (active at one location)
and motorized transport, so any other moving activity might end up in one of
those categories. For daily use our tracking is pretty accurate for most
activity types and users can manually correct any mistakes.

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TallGuyShort
This is pretty cool, although it would be nice to see the different types of
transportation across the same city. I see dramatic differences in the
visualizations, sure, but they seem as dramatic as the differences in the
layout and structure of these cities.

While I'm giving feedback, I must say I had to pause and re-read this sentence
many times: "Human helps people move almost twice as much in six weeks". As
I'm not familiar with the app, I went straight to that sentence and was
baffled about some person who helps people change their place of residence a
lot more for 6 weeks, but a lot more... compared to what? Took a while to
arrive at "An app named 'Human' helps get people to move around more than they
otherwise would within six weeks of beginning usage".

~~~
pveugen
Thanks for the feedback.

We rendered visuals for different activities in all cities. Click one of the
cities on the homepage for details. We've also shared all visuals (dark and
light) and some bonus gifs on Dropbox:
[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/58chppkj2ckim7s/AAAchKhSL56mjaaiA...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/58chppkj2ckim7s/AAAchKhSL56mjaaiASKrMxP-a)

~~~
moogleii
New York is missing a graphic

~~~
pveugen
Thanks! Fixed.

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neuralk
If you liked this, you may also enjoy Foursquare's visualization of checkins,
which shows the pulse of the city and the change in human activities (and
which areas are populated) as the day progresses:

New York City [http://vimeo.com/75413842](http://vimeo.com/75413842)

San Francisco [http://vimeo.com/75416817](http://vimeo.com/75416817)

Tokyo [http://vimeo.com/75404940](http://vimeo.com/75404940)

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crisnoble
Does anyone know if there is an app that will produce a similar map, but that
uses just your own data? I would love to have a map like that that shows where
in my city I have been and that would encourage me to see more spots.

~~~
reubenmorais
Strava will let you do this if you pay for premium. It's called Personal
Heatmaps. It's typically used for running/cycling/swimming, but nothing stops
you from using it to track your location.

[http://www.strava.com](http://www.strava.com)

~~~
crisnoble
I use Strava for my runs and rides, and you can get the heatmap (or at least
similar) through the third party VeloViewer
([http://veloviewer.com/](http://veloviewer.com/)) by looking at your "wheel".

I basically want my always on and exportable Moves ([http://moves-
app.com/](http://moves-app.com/)) data to port into "Personal Heatmaps" of
Strava.

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dalacv
Mexico City is not showing up as a leader in walking. I find that hard to
believe.

~~~
potatolicious
This is a _really_ self-selected data set. If you look at the New York map
you'd think people didn't exist in most of Brooklyn and Queens.

Ditto Vancouver where I originally come from - lots of activity downtown and
in rich, young neighborhoods, but nearly zero activity in middle class or
older neighborhoods.

It's not just selecting for iPhone users, it's selecting for wealthy, young,
iPhone users. On a more meta level these maps are an interesting proxy for
wealth, race, and age.

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bdg
I can't make a meaningful interpretation from this. It looks pretty, but what
does it mean?

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zahrathustra
Does anyone know the name of the music that's playing?

