Very rarely will you ever come across a graph, map or anything related to technology that will look as stunning as this. Aaron Parecki, co-founder of Geologqi, a platform for real-time location, messaging and analytics, decided to illustrate all the data that he logged in through Geoloqui over the course of three and a half years. Once he had all the data gathered, it was run through a custom script that project the GPS logs onto a 2D map.
According to Parecki, approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when he was moving, and the images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. As he says himself:
“Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is coloured by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live…To get data at this resolution, I had to bring back-up batteries with me and charge my phone whenever I could. I would manually turn the tracker on when I moved, and turn if off when I was at an indoor location for a long period of time. To get this level of accuracy results in a great deal of battery drain.”
It’s fascinating (and perhaps a little unsettling) to see just how well our movements can be tracked and over such a long period of time. It also helps that the graphs are nice to look at, almost looking like a piece of art instead of a large amount of data represented visually. You can see the rest of Parecki’s graphs and visualisations on his Flickr page.
[Images via Flickr: aaronparecki]
