Final Year Studio - Research - Data Visualisation - VisitorVille

Animation courtesy of www.visitorville.com

VisitorVille allows the user to view their internet traffic in physical enivronments such as buildings and even entire cities. It opens up the 'associative bandwidth' in regards to perceiving internet activities, a good example is the animation above. Here users of the internet using various search engines are being visualised, not by an abstract styled graph showing how many people clicked 'Search' and how many clicked 'Back' to the results page, but an actually 'hub' of communication transfer for the physical world, a bus station. This program uses the 'subliminal signals' of real life situations and environments to display information to the user, in this case the users definition of when an area is 'busy' or 'crowded.' This way of displaying information has a universal, un-lingual attribute, the only problem is that it requires the users past experiences of enivronments to decipher the information correctly. This could be a problem as an individual living in a rural area will have a different perception of an environment being 'busy' than, say, a city dweller.

This specific work is a key influence to my project as it directly attacks the 'associative bandwidth' of the Internet and how we perceive the medium. It is important to note that the above animation is from the 2D version of the program and there is also a true to life 3D edition, widening the 'associative bandwidth' even more. I hope now to look at more conceptual styled data visualisation, hopefully 3D as well as 2D to develop me idea further.

Click here for website