fd2s Blog

The City of New York recently opened up access to a slew of public data sources via its NYC Data Mine, and is sponsoring a competition to encourage developers to create web and mobile applications that utilize this data. All of the applications can be found on the NYC BigApps web site, and the winners will be announced on February 4.

As you would expect, there were quite a few entries with wayfinding or mapping functionality, for everything from locating dog parks to touring historic homes. Here are a couple of the most interesting:

UpNext 3D NYC

UpNext 3D NYC is an iPhone app that uses city GIS data and building perimeter outlines to create an interactive 3D map of New York.

In addition to providing a very detailed and clear 3D view (much more accurate than what you get with Google Earth, for example), the application also provides detailed information about subway stations and routes, and can provide the locations of nearby bars, restaurants, and other businesses, as well as parks, bike racks, and events.

WayFinder NYC

WayFinder NYC is an augmented reality application for Android phones that helps users to find New York subway and New Jersey Path stations. The user just aims the phone as if they were taking a picture, and the application indicates subway and PATH stations in that direction. When the user faces another direction, the list of stations will change accordingly.

By clicking on a station name, the user can get a map and walking directions to that station.

Ride the City

It appears that Ride the City existed before the BigApps competition, and it is also has versions for other cities, but is still eligible for the competition because it utilizes the City of New York’s LION centerline data.

The application delivers Google-Maps-style turn-by-turn directions for cyclists. It avoids busy roadways, and directs cyclists to bike lanes/paths where they are available. It is also aware of elevation changes, and recommends flatter routes when appropriate.

The application also has a fairly comprehensive database of bike shops, which are indicated on the route maps.

PrimoSpot

PrimoSpot uses the city’s parking facilities database to help drivers navigate New York’s notoriously difficult parking landscape. The application, available for the iPhone and Android devices, provides locations for garages, street parking, and bike racks, searchable by proximity to the user’s location.

For garages, the application includes information about parking rates, and for spots on the street there are detailed parking regulations, including special notations for spots that – based on the current time – are about the become legal parking spaces. Google StreetView integration helps users to find garages, and the application can even record were a user parked, making it easy to find their car or bicycle later.

BigMapple

While getting a little further from a true wayfinding application, BigMapple does offer some interesting map-related functionality.

One of several applications that take information from the city’s various event databases and display it on a map provided by the Google API, BigMapple adds another interesting element. It displays clickable icons for recent Twitter updates and Flickr uploads from the geographic area shown on the map.

While the current volume of Tweets and images is low, it is easy to imagine how these could work with the event listings to provide a nice overview of things happening around a neighborhood if the application takes off.

If you have experience with any of these applications, or see others in the BigApps gallery that look interesting, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

The frenetic pace of the conference continued on Thursday with nearly 20 presentations, demos and panels. A couple highlights:

• Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap spun a yarn about “ubiquitous geocontext.” He took us through an imaginary day in the not so distant future when our everyday interactions are encoded with geographic information and networked to share that information. For example, your car may “know” that when your gas tank is less than a quarter tank full, it should “look” for the least expensive gas available along your route, select the most efficient detour, and direct you to it. Your car may also alert you that Fred is offering to pay $10 to share a ride to work with you and that the detour required to pick him up would only take 5 minutes. Your appliances — such as your car, phone, calendar — will collaborate to perform realtime cost-benefit analysis based on your location, what you want to do, and where you are headed. None of these activities are difficult computing problems to solve, but they do require that geocontextual information is standardized (which it already is) and freely available (which much of it is not.) That’s the case for OpenStreetMap, a crowd-sourced repository of geographic information that is rivalling the more closed and/or proprietary data owned by Navteq and GeoAtlas. Think of it as Wikipedia for maps. Much of the informal conversation at the conference delved into the tautologies of “how open is an open API” and how closed is a black box.
• Bruce Daniel of Cartifact Labs spoke lyrically about the beauty of maps. He presented Cartifact’s maps of New York and Los Angeles: a clean, current base map with an interactive lens. As you sweep the lens over an area you can display maps of that area drafted in the 1800s. See for yourself at maps.cartifact.com.

This week I am participating in “Where 2.0,” a conference that focuses on innovations in “the geospatial web” — an ever-broadening category of technologies that utilize location information in some way. By grounding data (often literally) to its physical location on the planet, software can monitor, visualize, analyze, and even predict a mind-boggling variety of results.

While I was eager to learn about the latest crop of location-based services, such as applications for mobile phones and mapping technologies, I could not have imagined the extent to which the intersection of web technologies, GPS, and mobile phones has electrified the entrepreneurial and research communities. Here are just a few reports that represent the breadth of yesterday’s discussions.

• MIT MediaLab professor Sandy Petland introduced us to “Reality Mining” — the pursuit of understanding how organizations work by analyzing who’s talking to whom and who’s out of the loop. One could study the flow of information through a company by tracking email volleys, but he found it much more insightful to analyze in-person meetings by monitoring location and route data of employees. (Research made possible by RFID and other location-sensing devices.) Organizations with more formal and informal in-person interactions were more productive. What does that say about tele-commuting?
• Glympse announced their mobile application with the grammarian’s nightmare of a tagline: “Share your where.” The application allows you to share your location and real-time route with anyone you choose to, for as long as you choose to. The application tracks your route and sends updates to email/phone to the people you allow to monitor your route. See Bob Tedeschi’s review of the product in today’s New York Times.
• Two products are in the running for “coolest demo” — I leave it to you to choose: Joker Racer, a remote-controlled car via WiFi and over the internet that was described for the geeky audience as a “drivable linux server” or Velodyne’s Lidar, a sensor that uses 64 lasers to capture real-time surroundings in three dimensions — used by automatically-driven vehicles, the U.S. military and Radiohead.

What on earth (forgive the pun) will today’s sessions bring?

As mentioned in Leslie’s recent post about delivering better wayfinding information online, we are big fans of Google Maps and the wayfinding-related things you can do with the Google API.

Now New York City and Google have partnered to create a web site (www.nycgo.com) and information center (at 810 Seventh Avenue) that use Google’s latest technology and information offerings to inform and direct city visitors.

The site has some great features and a lot of content, but the most interesting thing about this project may be the touch screens in the information center, which are demonstrated in this video.

Many complex facilities focus their efforts to improve wayfinding on the “real world” — physical signs to guide people in and around the environment. But even the most wayfinding-savvy organizations often do not extend their reach into the “digital world,” where many of their visitors start their journey.

Here are ten ways to deliver better wayfinding information online:

1. Provide an easy way for visitors to your web site to generate customized direction sets to or from your facility. Whether you offer an offsite link to a mapping web site like Google or Yahoo, or you invest the resources to create a customized tool on your own site, it is very helpful to visitors to be able to print accurate driving directions from their home to your campus.

2. Review the main mapping sites and confirm that they are providing accurate directions to your location. Google, Mapquest and Yahoo rely on third-party providers of street information and sometimes they can contain errors, such as incorrect street names or traffic flows. Each site offers ways to alert their providers about mistakes. Test getting directions to your address from different parts of town.

3. Explain parking options on your web site. If you have multiple parking options, like lots or garages and valet parking, list them all on your site, along with hours of operations and fees. Help your visitors determine the most convenient parking option for their destination.

4. Convey information about public transit options and private offerings such as intra-campus shuttles. Link to public transportation trip-planning sites, if available in your area.

5. Offer a version of your web site optimized for mobile browsing. With browser recognition, your web site can be optimized to deliver a mobile-friendly version for cell phone users. As we’ve said in a previous post, everyone now carries their own personal wayfinding device — the cell phone. Confirm that your visitors can find relevant information on their phones as they approach your facility or at your facility.

6. List all your street addresses on a single line, such as “500 Chicon, Austin TX 78702″ so that they can be easily pasted into a mapping application.

7. Alert your visitors about street closures and construction that may impede their journey to your facility. Alerts should be prominently placed on your web site and updated regularly.

8. For complex facilities and campuses, provide walking directions from parking to the visitor’s destination. Often the most frustrating part of a journey to a new facility is finding your way from parking into the right building and up the right elevator.

9. Offer information on popular amenities in the wayfinding section of your web site. Where can a visitor find food, a taxi stand or an ATM?

10. Maintain and update your wayfinding information on a regular schedule. Outdated information is worse than useless — it will negatively impact your visitors’ experience.

For some, the word “cartography” may still conjure up images of parchment maps and sexants on the high seas, but as Esquire reports in their profiles of the Best and Brightest 2008, four innovative designers are redefining the art and science of map-making.

There are two kinds of maps showcased in this short web showcase:

• Maps that overlay data onto traditional geographic maps, such as Laura Kurgan’s lacy world map that plots city population increases and decreases as a third dimension
• Maps used as navigational devices for large, non-geographic data sets, such as Eric Rodenbeck’s visualization of the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ArtScope

Both types of maps are built upon vast collections of data, and when produced by thoughtful designers like Kurgan and Rodenbeck certainly inspire, inform and delight!

From the Canadian Design Resource site, here are a couple of images (click to enlarge) of an interesting deployment of wayfinding maps in Victoria, British Columbia.

As you can see, they have actually applied the maps to existing utility boxes, which has a number of benefits:

• The maps add a second level of functionality to the utility box, while also making it more attractive.
• The approach eliminates the need for additional installations in the right-of-way, and minimizes visual clutter in the environment.
• The thee-dimensional nature of the boxes makes the maps more noticeable than they would be on a flat sign panel.
• The consistent location of the utility boxes (on signal poles) helps users to find the maps as they move throughout the area.
• And of course it’s a great use of resources.

A couple of weeks ago, in a post about a pilot wayfinding program for visually impaired people, I mentioned that the program being tested by Royal College of Art research associate David Sweeney might actually create an experience that was more rewarding than that of fully sighted individuals. This was based on the fact that the hand-held system did more than just get the user from origin to destination. It also called attention to points of interest along the way.

Now, thanks to Jeff Parks at I.A. Consultants, I have learned about a presentation that Frog Design’s Jennifer Kilian made earlier this year at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference. Part of the presentation is a case study of the Merian Scout Navigator, which is a GPS-enabled device that employs some of the same concepts as Sweeney’s system, although in service to a very different audience.

The device, developed by Frog for German travel publisher Merian, provides the turn-by-turn driving directions you expect from a GPS navigation system, but it also leverages Merian’s travel content to serve as a sort of virtual tour guide, describing important sights and also presenting opportunities for users to alter their route in order to visit destinations they might have otherwise missed

The UK site Design Week has a short article about the ongoing work of Royal College of Art research associate David Sweeney in the area of wayfinding for the visually impaired. Sweeney’s presentation to an audience at the RCA, titled The Sound of North: Wayfinding for Visually Impaired People, has been mentioned in several places in recent days, but this article is the most thorough that I have seen.

Sweeney is making use of an interesting combination of technologies that, for the most part anyway, already exist.

He tested out three pilot ideas at the Vassall Centre, driven by existing technologies: a talking, tactile map of the location; a hand-held torch using radio frequency identification technology used by swipe cards that speaks the name of your environment when cued by sensor tags en route; and a smart camera that is pinned to the front of your body to see tags with quick-response codes along the route.

One thing that sounds very interesting about this project is its apparent attempt to not just do the bare minimum to get visually impaired to their destination, but to actually create an experience that is as rewarding (and in some ways more rewarding) than that of fully sighted individuals.

The Pathfinder is an attempt to incorporate all wayfinding functions in one device. Being hand-held, it gives more personal control over your journey, says Sweeney, responding by sound, vibration or whatever alert you choose to pre-selected tags or prompts along your chosen route. You might find a WC, a gallery, a park or whatever that you hadn’t expected and break your journey as a sighted person might.

Among other features, Sweeney envisages a ‘Wikinav’, alerting you to interesting places or features or giving a bit of historical data. There could even be a tie-in with Google, he foresees.

The purpose of the RCA presentation was to expose these ideas to potential technology partners and institutional users, so it will be interesting to see if Sweeney is able to move the project forward. There is already some indication that the Victoria & Albert Museum may be interested in a possible trial, which would actually focus on using the technology to deliver exhibit information, rather than functioning primarily as a wayfinding tool for the visually impaired.