LIVE Singapore! is a really exciting project from the SENSEable City Lab and part of the Future Urban Mobility research initiative at the Singapore and MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Researchers have collaborated on the development of an open platform for collating and publishing a range of innovative, real-time data visualisations about the city. It is being described as a “feedback loop between people, their actions, and the city“.
The researchers behind the project describe the purpose of these visualisations:
The visualizations aim to provide greater understanding of some of the city’s dynamics… Giving people visual and tangible access to real-time information about their city enables them to take their decisions more in sync with their environment, with what is actually happening around them.
The project has so far developed a portfolio of six great visualisations which investigate different areas of interest and relevance to the city of Singapore:
- Isochronic Singapore – The geographical and temporal patterns of traffic and journey duration
- Raining Taxis – How does the taxi transportation system behaves in relation to rainfall?
- Urban Heat Islands – The varying temperatures and energy consumption levels around Singapore
- Formula One City – Text message patterns reveal how such events impact on the city’s routine
- Real-time Talk – The patterns of cellphone network usage across Singapore
- Hub of the World – How is Singapore affected by being the world’s busiest hubs in the world?
The project is also focused on developing flexible and accessible API’s to allow developers to tap in to the potential of this body of work and enable the visualisations to incorporate ‘query and search’ to open up the practical benefits of true interactivity.
Impressive animated versions of these visualsiations make up the LIVE Singapore! exhibition which is on display at the Singapore Art Museum. Furthermore, two of the projections will be on show at Urban Redevelopment Authority’s Marina Bay City Gallery.
You can read more about the project, the findings about the dynamics of taxi movements in wet weather and Singapore’s increasing movement towards turning data into useful applications in this Strait Times article (sub required).