Fly Cab by Tomas Apodaca
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Cabspotting traces San Francisco’s taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible. The Exploratorium has invited artists and researchers to use this information to reveal these “Invisible Dynamics.” The core of this project is the Cab Tracker. The Tracker averages the last four hours of cab routes into a ghostly image, and then draws the routes of ten in-progress cab rides over it. The Time Lapse area of the project reveals time-varying patterns such as rush hour, traffic jams, holidays and unusual events. New projects are produced by the Exploratorium’s visiting artists and also created by the larger Cabspotting community. Fly Cab uses the open-source programming language/environment Processing to render the path of a single San Francisco cab over a period of 5 days. The cab is represented by a yellow dot, and as it moves, it leaves a white trail behind to show where it’s been. The dot moves 2000 times as fast as the cab it’s representing, so the five days pass in a little less than 4 minutes. As soon as a point on the cab’s trail is drawn, it starts to sink down, so that each new point on the trail is slightly higher than the point preceeding it. As the trail gets longer, it builds a 3-dimensional structure of the cab’s travels through the city over time. By examining the structure you can see not only what parts of the city the cab has been visiting, but how often it vists them. As you’re watching the cab travel, you may notice occasional stutters, abrupt jumps from one part of the city to another, or long spikes that can’t possibly represent a real vehicle’s path. These anomalies are a different sort of map–one of the reliability of the cab’s GPS receiver, whose once-a-minute reports may be blocked by the city’s geographic features, scrambled by hardware malfunctions or just lost in transit.  |
