Invisible Journeys is my first try at data visualisation. I have seen a few wifi geographical mapping, but they looked a bit too technical to my taste. Here, i aimed at a semi abstract visualisation while keeping the ability to extract sense out of the graphics. Below is one of the visualisation showing 4 different journeys. Bigger to smaller rings : London / Vescemont / Belfort / Barcelona.
Each circular item represent the recording of wireless network through a journey.
The time dimension starts reading from the right then it goes clockwise along the main black thick line.
Each successful recording influences the time line thickness and adds a “pin”. Red pins represent non encrypted networks other networks are the smaller black ones.
Technically i have been using kismet for recording the wifi nodes. Unlike Netsumbler (windows only), kismet spits a nicely formated xml file for each session. The only limitation i’ve found was that you can’t use it with a laptop that have pcmcia card. Those cards can’t go into rfmon mode (to constantly scan the network).
Once the xml file was created, it was then easy to get all the data into processing using the xml native library.
Next step is to pair wifi recording with gps. The good new is that Kismet seems to be able to handle both at the time.
More images of the ongoing process can be found on my flickr set
more later.
Processing sketch made on the train journey between London and Newcastle and Newcastle and London. This is an attempt of recording a journey, or at least a part of it.
On the way out the program was grabing a web cam input pointed at the landscape, then squeeze the camera frame to 1 pixel wide and rotate it through time. On the way back it actually grab only the first vertical line of pixel and apply the same transformations as previouslly. This was to get rid of a moire effect that happend on the first version. nice!
Well, it was fun and entertaining coding on the train and looking at people around trying to figure out what the hell what i was doing pointing that camera at the window all the time.
In the end it looked as i wanted, a bit like truck’s speed recording graph. Truck speed recording graphs are nice looking. A bit like seismographs but circular. I like truck speed recording graphs.
Train slowiiinnnnggggg dooowwnn at the station.
source code
Research for the illustrations for the make art the international festival dedicated to the integration
of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) in digital arts.
I stupidly haven’t taken any pictures from the final printed result.
All the illustrations where exported to pdf then i did a few color adjustment in illustrator, to meet printing standards. Under linux i unfortunately couldn’t find a vector application that could open and edit the pdf files that processing exports.
The only app i found that could open the pdfs was Xaraxtreme but from there it was impossible to break apart the illustration. Still it was a good occasion to see how fast the vector rendering was on Xara. Thousands of shapes and no slowing down.
I’m not sure what processing uses to export pdfs. There might be something to modifiy at core level so it exports to a more linux friendly format.
… to be continued
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