Distance Visualisation for two people

This tool visualises the locations and distances of two individual travelers over time.

• It uses the Google Maps API as ground data and plots the locations as hearts (see history) into the map.

• This can then be played as animation with appropriate zoom levels or interacted with by using the slider of the time point.

  • The speeds vary for days spend at home and on traveling location such that the travels are streched in time

• With colors the distance (red for far away) is also displayes as heatmap beneath the slider.

• At the left panel the locations and distances are displayed together with the days wich where spend together by the two people.

History

This is tool I wrote as a wedding gift for two of my friends. During their years-long journey towards their wedding they traveled a lot. This tool visualised this journey and gave a non linear overview of their time together and apart whereever tey were.

Usage

1. Open animatePins_google.html as text file and optionally edit GREEN, BLUE, TITLE etc. and insert your Google Maps API key at the bottom where it says __APIKEY__.
2. Look into the files data/locations.csv, data/green.csv, data/blue.csv and insert your data.
3. Open animatePins_google.html in a webbrowser
4. At the bottom load the data from [2] you want to visualize into the programm with the buttons for Locations, GREEN, BLUE
5. Adjust how many ticks per day for home locations (fast) and remote locations (slow) sould pass and how long a travel should last on average in ticks.
6. Hit generate Data and you will see a timeline and can hit Play.
7. You can always adjust the speed in ticks/second, the map style (default or silver-green) or reset your settings (also loaded data)

Data

You need to manually generate your data into the three given files.

Personal travel file (GREEN.csv, BLUE.csv)

For each of the two people there has to be .csv file separeted by semicola and containing the following data:

Field	Description
destination_name	Name of the destination
lat	latitudinal position in format 2.000101 (optional if locations.csv is given)
lng	longitudinal position in format 2.000101 (optional if locations.csv is given)
arrival_date	arrival data at destination
departure_date	departure data from destination
default_after_location	destination where the person is normally located (home) after (optional if previously given and not changed)
display_name	optional alternative display name to destination_name e.g. "Conference" instead of "Trento"

Locations file

In this file a list of all destinations and their locations can be given to shorten the personal travel file: Name;lng;lat;lng

Field	Description
destination_name	Name of the destination
lng	longitudinal position in format 2.000101
lat	latitudinal position in format 2.000101
lng	longitudinal position in format 2.000101 again?!

ToDo

• unfortunately the start and end date has to be manually given to the pinControl.js
• there is an error in counting together-days if the displayed name is different but location is the same.
• default_after_location is not an optimal solution
• documentation