I found this really amazing guy Fabien Girardin. He shows the “traces” left by Flickr tourists and citizens as they transit Barcelona based on around 4000 images taken between October and December of 2006. A trace consists of an ordered set of geotagged images taken by one person in one day. The data and visualizations is a bit hard to follow, but there’s potential for patterns of how tourists navigate the urban space. He also found that the maps do not gage a sense of time, but they do highlight when and where the traces start and end.

These heatmaps directed my research to another level, and started my thinking about (consumer) line-of sight/target advertising.
There’s an article about how advertisers are now looking to use what they would consider "unsold" space to place their messages. This phenomenon even has a name, urban spam. But why just post the same ad for everyone to see? Why not use an individual viewer’s line of sight as they travel as a "channel" into which to project ads and messages where blank space exists?
Where Girardin’s heat maps showed the locations of single images, the traces follow the path the photographer takes through the city/their visual corridor.
(Cities as Billboards)

This entry was posted by galina, on Tuesday, 27 March 2007. You can leave your response.