Cell Tower Viz

I was recently going through my archive drives, and stumbled upon some work I did for a data-visualization class at ITP taught by Lisa Strausfield (of Pentagram). My final project was a visual abstraction and exploration of the FCC cell tower database.

I remember the pain of normalizing the vast amounts of data, and being extremely dissatisfied, frustrated at its incompleteness and difficulty of use. The regex required to parse that data into something MySQL would import was among the gnarliest i've ever written - multi-line nests of pain.

But when I did manage to get the normalized data into a number of MySQL tables, I was a kid in a candy-shop. With a [then] rudimentary working-knowledge of Java/OpenGL, I was able to wrangle out maps based solely on the tower geo-coords, and display a number of ancillary data-points.

After I had my fill mapping out the towers and displaying their cell id's, I started to explore the height of the tower structures:

The beauty of custom code allowed my to write controls to drill down and explore the structures that came out of the data.

The roughly rendered tower abstraction reminded me of poorly realized sci-fi imagery of cyberspace.

These images don't make good visualizations in and of themselves. The interactivity made them good. I didn't build these for anyone but myself. There was no GUI [aside from movement controlled via the mouse coordinates] - only a code interface &em; I controlled the visualization with code I wrote and could manipulate to show me what I wanted to explore.

For the non-hackers, interfaces are a must - as large data-sets like this are difficult to explore without control of displayed data-points, scale, base coordinate projections...