Urban Mobs is a project by Orange and faberNovel which visualises patterns of movement in the city based on mobile phone usage currently being exhibited in the Dans la nuit, les images exhibition. The project includes videos visualising a range of phone usage/movements in France, Spain, Romania and Poland and builds on the work of the MIT Senseable City Lab's 2006 Real Time Rome exhibition.
On a similar theme is the MIT World's Eyes project which data mines flickr photographs to track patterns of movements of tourists in Spain producing some impressive visualisations
Visualisations of mobile usage are now even available as a service for the Blackberry. In San Francisco CitySense allows the user identify nightlight hotspots based on the concentration of phone usage.The application powered by Sense Networks macrosense doesn't provide any richer data other then concentration, but the way things are going can that be really be far behind?
These visualisations of course echo Chombart de Lauwe's famous map plotting every journey a Parisienne student made in a year which so influenced Situationist thought on urban routine and the Theory Of the Derive and in some ways concretise Michel de Certeau's assertion that pedestrian movements form one of those "real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city"
While the impetus behind these and other realitymining projects is to improve knowledge about how people use mobile phones and other devices in order to design a next generation of products which better respond to actual usage requirements there are obvious implications in urban planning and it is even suggested this data can be used to improve epidemiological modelling of the spread of infectious diseases like SARS. I'm interested in them as I think they have an even more important role in visualising the extent of our datatrail, of course the upshot is that once you choose to carry a mobile phone you and your location can and will be tracked, anonymously or otherwise, and the smarter your phone the more data there is to mine.
On that note I leave you with the beautiful BBC Britain from Above visualisations
