Tracking Tracktown's Flow of Students

My Inspiration

Being given such an open ended final project assignment made me think hard and long about what I wanted to invest my time into. I wanted to research and write about something interesting and relevant, that drew inspiration from different sources. I ended up drawing inspiration from three totally different sources. The words that I used to structure my search of inspiration were relevance, familiarity, and visual. When I was brainstorming ideas and came across the word relevance, I knew I wanted to make my project relevant to everyone in my discourse community, with whom I interact with most. The most appropriate and common thing I share with everybody here at the University of Oregon, is, well, simply, we go to the University of Oregon.

Now that I had narrowed my options down, I felt a lot more on top of things, but I still had a long way to go. The next theme of my project that I wanted to finalize was the question at issue that I would be trying to answer with my work. The set of questions that I chose seemed relatable and familiar to all University of Oregon students, and to my knowledge had not been answered before. They are as follows:

• What route to class will get me there in the quickest amount of time?
• What parts of campus are the busiest at different times of the day?
• What is the best place and time to try and get signatures for a petition, by exposing your cause to the most people?

The birth of this set of questions came from the second inspiration to my project: CabSpotting. Recorded by Scott Snibbe as part of the research project Invisible Dynamics through funding from the San Francisco Exploratorium, CabSpotting compiled GPS data from taxi cabs in San Francisco and made a heat map of their paths.

With San Francisco being where I call home, it was cool to see the popular areas, shown by the more dense line concentration, and compare the results with the areas that I thought were the busiest. The aspect of it that really got me interested in it was that it was relatable. I wanted to bring that same feeling of “I’ve seen this before” to University of Oregon students, by making my own heat map of campus. My goal for that was for people to feel a sense of familiarity, which would therefor make it relevant to my discourse community.

The third and final word that I centered my brainstorming around was visual. I believe that the visual components of a project are just as, if not more important than the research they are accompanied by. Pictures, and specifically pictures explaining data draw people’s eyes towards them and are able to captivate audiences with more excitement than a paragraph would. I wanted to create a model that people could interact with and make the results of my project come alive.

One artist who’s visuals captivated me was Daniel Miller. He integrates robotics, video and electronics into the exploration of systems and ecologies. He is currently the assistant professor of emerging technologies in sculpture at the school of art & art history at the University of Iowa. His piece “Contained” stood out to me.

“Contained” is a model of the city of Chicago, enclosed under a plastic dome. Every 40 minutes, a sun and a moon complete a full rotation around the city, simulating a day. During the night, the city is lit with an LED light, and within the dome “smog” created by ultrasonic humidifiers emits from the highway and the nearby coal fired power station. All of those factors make the model interactive, adaptive to change, and they create variables, much like Earth has. 

A video of Daniel Miller’s “Contained” can be downloaded Here.

Taking the three components of relevance, familiarity, and visual into consideration, and tying the works of Snibbe, Miller, as well as University of Oregon campus together, I was able to create what I call “DuckSpotting: Tracking Tracktown’s Flow of Students”. 

 Timelapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dstEB7aU8FE

This time-lapse of the intersection of University Street and East 15th Avenue shows people, bikes, and cars moving from 12:00pm until 12:50pm. It was a particularly windy and rainy day, and it was honestly miserable sitting atop the EMU trying to balance my phone as it, as well as myself got wet from the rain. However, sitting in the rain shows my dedication to this project!

The Process

Early one Sunday morning when there were minimal people on campus, I met Dean Walton at the EMU. Over an hour, we took almost 400 pictures of the EMU and the intersection of University and 15th, from all angles. To take the 350+ pictures, we used a 35mm Sony full-frame camera, that takes 24 mega-pixel images.

Once uploaded to the computer, we started a process called photo alignment, also known as structure from motion. What that process does is it compiles a bunch of photographs and their angles to create a digital 3D model. We sent the photos to a program made by Agisoft called Photoscan, where it was able to compile the images and create a digital 3D model. After that, we sent the digital model to Collada, a file form that deals with 3D representations. Lastly, we were able to make the model a Google Earth file, assign points in the model to their correct latitude and longitude points, and then finally upload it to Google Earth.

Note: Due to the Google Earth latitude and longitude numbers only having 5 decimal places, the model is about 10 feet off compared to Google Earth. However, it is not difficult to see the overlap of my 3D model of the EMU on top of the Google Earth EMU.

Problems I encountered

The overall setback I want to address is that I wanted to produce an amazing product. That may not seem like a negative at all, and it isn’t in retrospect. However, in the time table of six or seven weeks, my vision seemed more and more complicated as the weeks willowed down and week seven was staring me in the face. Regardless, here was my original vision:

• A 3D-printed model of the University of Oregon campus, much like Dan Miller’s model of Chicago, titled “Contained”, with interactive switches to show the flow of students by major, when its raining, when it’s sunny, at different times of the day, and on different days of the week

• A time-lapse video of student traffic on campus blended into a visual of the 3D-printed model of the University of Oregon campus, with lines forming a heat map across the model to show student paths
  • Different colored lines representing different majors, to see if different majors took certain paths, whether they be similar or different

Another problem that I had was that I was not able to create a 3D printed model on the EMU and intersection that my time lapse was focused on. I took over 350 pictures of seemingly every angle of the area, and still was only able to produce a half-visible image, with cracks and blanks all over it. This was troubling because it was something I was really looking forward to seeing. 

The more I worked hard to make my vision happen, the more I realized that it was not possible to create in less than ten weeks. To track students by major, I would have to stop and record the major of every single student on campus that my time-lapse captured. To track students when it was rainy, I would have to sit out in the rain while my phone got soaked, which I did, but it was miserable and cold. To track students at all different times of the day, I would have to skip class to capture time-lapses during specific hours. With all of these problems, along with the dilemma of a lack of resources and limited access to certain technologies, my exact vision just was not reachable in a window of ten weeks. But enough with the setbacks. Here’s my project!

Proposal:

Although I faced some unexpected challenges, I still think fully completing this project after this course is over would be cool and rewarding. My vision would be to have a full 3D printed model of the University of Oregon campus, with interactive switches to act as the sun, moon, and other natural elements of nature that are present in Eugene. Next, I would like to have many different time lapses highlighting different areas of campus, paired with drawn paths of different students with different majors, which would highlight many differences.  The Student Life section of the University of Oregon website states, “Getting from home to class (or anywhere else) at the University of Oregon is pretty easy. You can walk from one side of campus to the other in less than fifteen minutes.” I want to use my research to challenge this claim, and see if it really is possible to get from anywhere to anywhere on campus in less than fifteen minutes, taking traffic, weather, and time all into account.

I also want to look at the topography of Eugene, and how that plays a role in effecting the traffic patterns on campus.

Although this is a fairly pixelated photo, campus is the light brown oval above the grid of lines, which shows how flat it is, relative to the rest of Eugene. Although I was not able to do much research on this, the topography plays a big role in the routes people take to class, and I think it would be cool to incorporate if I end up trying to finish all of my goals for this project in the long run. Overall, this process and course have been awesome. I’ve enjoyed both, and have learned so much. I loved having a small class size for in-depth discussions with about 12 intelligent people, which is something a lecture class would not have been able to offer. This class inspired me to sign up for another freshman seminar next term which I’m excited for. I think more classes should be like this one! I hope you enjoyed my final project, DuckSpotting: Tracking Tracktown’s Flow of Students!