We will not be able to make sense of this endless ocean of information, unless we pay attention to the basics of handling data and presenting them in aesthetically pleasing ways. Aesthetics is what makes this visualization stand out.
However, designing this visualization is not as easy as it looks. Ample amount of experiments and researches have led to the visualization that we see here.
The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne.Here is an example of beautiful visualization that can be produced using the processing programming environment.
It’s easy to forget just how many planes are in the skies above us but this visualization reminds us of exactly that and effectively maps the traffic between the various cities of United states. Data from the US federal aviation Administration is used to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density. FAA data is parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.
The visualization shows flights as glowing dots on a black background and its interesting to see how the geography becomes visible as more flights paths are drawn. This visualization allows us to see the frequency, connections, and opacity of the trails that the flights leave behind as they crisscross around The United States of America. At the very glance the traffic density in and around United states can be captured through this visualization.
However, there are some fundamental problems with this visualization. To start with there is no text or legend representing what the visualization is about. There should be a mechanism to measure or differentiate on the basis of color, thickness, and degree of shading of the connecting lines. Secondly further details regarding the aircrafts or the altitudes etc. cannot be figured from the visualization. The goal here is to facilitate reading and you are forced to justify all your options so as to make it sensible for the viewers.
So, dashboards hold a lot of promise to make sense of the world around us, but only if we think through what data goes into them and how the visuals we are building need to grab our audience. A highly efficient visualization should provide real-time updating, interactivity, and collaborative features. User should be able to decompose charts, drill through measures, zoom in or zoom out on time lines and reveal new things.
References:
http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/lost-in-visualization#axzz4eA6OxVBc.