A Dazzling Animation of London’s Bicycle Commuters

What is this thing, a new species of bioluminescent blob dredged up from the Mariana Trench?

Actually, it’s us – a visualization of how humans travel by bicycle around central London. The entrancing video was created by Jo Wood, a professor of visual analytics at City University who writes papers with names like “Interactive visual exploration of a large spatio-temporal dataset: Reflections on a geovisualization mashup.” Clearly, he knows his stuff.

Wood’s animation shows a year of rides among users of the bike-sharing program Barclays Cycle Hire. The program today involves 570 stations and about 8,000 bikes, so Wood’s data set was huge, encompassing some 5 million journeys that occurred in the year after Barclays launched in 2010.

read more at the Atlantic >>