HERE and CartoDB partner to visualize 24hrs of life in cities

Summary

This post may describe functionality for an old version of CARTO. Find out about the latest and cloud-native version here.
HERE and CartoDB partner to visualize 24hrs of life in cities

living cities homepage

We have worked together with HERE to visualize how cities come to life. Using data continuously collected by HERE through connected devices such as smartphones and cars users can see how movement changes over 24 hours in five major cities: London Chicago Rome Helsinki and Mumbai.

The visualization makes use of Torque technology for visualizing dynamic data.

real time chicago map

More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas. Cities are growing steadily and by 2050 6.4 billion people will live in a city. Already a large portion of city populations carry some sort of connected device like mobile phones GPS devices or tablets. The data generated can be used to better understand and plan how cities work with the goal of making smarter cities in our future.

Today we announce a collaboration with HERE to release of a new visualization called Living Cities. It analyzes and visualizes transit information dynamic demographic information such as language usage in neighborhoods points of interest and bold facts. The result is a fresh visualization showcasing a normal day in London Chicago Rome Helsinki and Mumbai. Users can view how a city changes through different times of the day and learn various facts about the city neighborhoods places and people. The visualization allows users control and interact with the map and sharing facts in social networks.

real time mumbai map

The data behind the visualization is continuously collected by HERE through connected devices. This data is then anonymized and aggregated so that HERE can see how traffic is flowing (or not) in the city. With that data HERE creates up-to-date maps that are used online and on millions of devices. If a road is closed or if a new road has opened for example HERE can quickly make changes so that its maps are fresh and accurate.

The visualization was built by CartoDB using their cloud infrastructure. It makes use of HTML5 technology to animate geospatial data sets over time. Data is aggregated by HERE and hosted on CartoDB to be used in the visualization. It makes use of some of new technologies that will become available in CartoDB 2.1 and is a good example on how big data and visualization can provide insight into our cities.

We hope you enjoy it!