Category: Projects

Zoom Zoom Zoom is a triptych studying the relationship between scale, resolution, and zooming in aerial imagery.

The first image functions as a ‘typical’ zoom, where an increasingly smaller geographic extent fills the same area. The second image crops its extent to match the area presented in the first, while maintaining its pixel resolution and scale. The third image resamples pixels within the smallest extent as the first zooms out, with the largest extent being the most “pixelated”.

Why Zoom?

Zooming digitally represents the same features — whether buildings, parks, or streets — at different scales. However, each change in scale also means a change in resolution, transforming the feature again as it has more or less detail. Furthermore, each change in scale prompts a change in adjacency, and meaning, between those features. A leaf becomes a tree, which becomes a forest, which becomes a park in the city.

Technicals

The cropped and zoomed images were exported from QGIS at the various resolutions and extents. The pixelated third image is generated in the browser using p5.js, which also handles the scrolling action to change scales.

Next Steps

• Export pixelated images from Processing rather than generate them in the browser, for better performance.
• Repeat the study for other areas of New York City.

Intersections represents streets only where they intersect. On hover, the full lengths of crossing streets are shown, capturing other points along the way.

Intersections is similar to Dynamic Halftone (019), in that our mind fills in the missing pieces; the street grid is discernible even without the explicit connection.

Technical

Working from the NYCOD Street Centerline SHP, point objects were created from intersecting line segments, around which a buffer was drawn. Centerlines were then clipped to the buffer and exported as a GEOJSON.

Next Steps

• Increase geographic extent, and make pan-able.
• Try different color combinations for the background, line work, etc.

Typical, or, All the Blocks in Manhattan rejects the notion of a “typical” New York City block.

When overlaid, all blocks appear to form a rectilinear density at the center. Yet, there is no standard shape or size, only a tangle of exceptions. Scrolling down the page individuates each of the blocks, and streams of skinny rectangles are routinely interrupted by irregularity.

Technical

A block shape file from NYCOD was exported from QGIS as a DXF file. In Rhino, individual line segments were joined into closed polygons, medians were culled, and self-intersecting lines were identified and trimmed.

The web map was built using d3.js. While typically used for charts, it also supports geographic functions including rendering GEOJSON objects as SVG elements. While the blocks were initially projected using the mercator projection, they were translated to form a cluster, and then positioned in a vertical line.

Next Steps

• Automatically scroll, up or down, accelerated with mouse movement from the center of the browser.
• Add blocks from all the boroughs of NYC.
• Add labels, on mouse over, indicating borough or neighborhood and area.

Looking Around is a photo series of the intersections along 72nd Street. How distinct is the north of each avenue from the south? Is everyone on 72nd St headed from or going to Central Park? How close to the shore can one get at either end?

The photos have two formats: as a grid, with each intersection arranged as a column and direction arranged into rows; and in clusters, where images are radially positioned around each intersection. Pressing the spacebar toggles between formats. Clicking any image presents a rapid succession of full-size images, either of all photos within an intersection or all photos in a particular direction across intersections.

The images were collected on the afternoon of Saturday, January 27th, 2018 using an iPhone X.

The image were positioned with D3.js and plotted horizontally by intersection.

Next Steps:

• Crop photos to squares and export two different file sizes: a downsized set for the thumbnail views, and a high-resolution set for full-size view.
• Fix scroll within a container element and not within the whole window, so the image sequence doesn’t need to be repositioned.

Crossing 72nd captures the sound, altitude, and walked path along the length of 72nd Street in Manhattan. Each is represented as a line, and the correspondence between them isn’t always evident. Described together, the sounds of a passing bike, children’s laughter and car horns animate the turns of the path.

Clicking at any point on the walked path jumps to the corresponding time in the audio. A vertical playhead indicates the position across all three representations.

Data was collected on the afternoon of Saturday, January 27th, 2018. GPS position and altitude were recorded using a Bad Elf GPS Logger, automatically logging data at 12 second intervals. Audio was recorded using an iPhone 6S, held while walking. Additional data included a series of photos at each intersection, one in each street direction.

In QGIS, the qProf plugin was used to read the GPX data — including timestamps, altitude and position. The captured points were then culled to smooth the line, thus, the irregular spacing of points.

Next Steps:

• Replace the recorded path points with ones taken at regular intervals along the path, using the QChainage plugin.
• Reduce noise in the audio track, particularly in windy sections.
• Fix scaling issue with the browser width.