Tonight I've been playing around with a python script which generates heatmaps from GPX files. The image above is a composite image of my last 10 runs in November (taken from my phone). It's fairly easy to see where I run most often.
What would be really cool would be if there was some way to visualise speed at a given point. The above image uses colour intensity to encode frequency of location; the more intense the colour, the more often I've run there. I'd find it interesting if it was possible to use colour to encode movement speed at a given point. For example, you could calculate the average speed across each run being visualised, and use different colours to represent above and below average, with varying saturation being used to represent how much above or below the average you were at that point.
Although I've seen a few existing methods of visualising speed (typically line charts), I've yet to see one which shows the relationship between speed and location. Endomondo and similar websites approach the issue by showing a map and separate chart for speed, and moving your mouse over either shows the corresponding location on map or speed on the chart. This exploratory method doesn't really give a good overview of the information.
This has the makings of a potential side project...
It feels unusually warm for November, which has made the past week quite pleasant for running. I've gotten 4 runs in over the last week, and I'm hoping to keep up at least 3 runs a week until the end of the semester. Dr Cutts talk last Wednesday on computing science education has caused a bit of introspection on how I use my time, and has made me realise that I don't always spend it wisely. I'm a workaholic, I get lots of work done, and I consider myself to be quite well organised. But maybe I could achieve similar things in a lot less time. Lately I've been focusing more on coursework, really trying to get as much done as early as possible. I've never had to pull an all-nighter working towards a deadline before, and I certainly don't plan to start any time soon.
I'm excited for the start of Week 12 because, other than the obvious reasons of having no more deadlines, I'm likely going to be putting on an Android development workshop in the School of Computing Science, along with another classmate. It'll be cool to give something back like that, and hopefully attendance is pretty decent. I'd certainly hope so, given that the Mobile Software Engineering degree has over 5 times as many students this year as last. The more Android projects I work on, the more I notice patterns emerging and the ability to re-use code. Things have gotten to the point now where any project I do in Android has about 50% re-used code. I think myself and James have a decent amount of experience to offer and can help teach other developers how to address problems that we've already encountered.
Week 12 is also the start of a fortnight dedicated to project work. My project at the moment is in quite a good state, I reckon. As far as implementation is concerned, I'm well ahead of schedule and the main technical concerns have been addressed. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I'm working with Microsoft Surface this year, and one of the technical challenges I'm approaching is how to display information when the Surface has stuff on top of it. I find this an interesting problem because it's only natural that a tabletop computer has to remain usable at the same time as being used as a table.
So far I've been iteratively developing a prototype which displays a shape in the largest unoccluded space, and have just started to animate this shape as it moves around the tabletop due to objects being placed on or removed from the Surface. There's some really cool stuff going on to make this work, and we (my project supervisor an I) are probably going to submit a work-in-progress paper to CHI2012 about our research so far. It's a new and novel area of research and it'd be the highlight of my academic "career" if that paper gets accepted.
Here's a terrible quality video I took earlier showing a prototype in action.
