Final Exam -
Spring 2011
Crazy
Train
The final exam
will include a typical individual data visualization phase, but it will
also include a group data collection phase. So far you have been
visualizing data that has been collected / generated / stored by others
in the way that they decided to do those tasks. Having seen how their
decisions affected your ease of visualization, now you get to make some
decisions up front on how to collect data to make it easier to
visualize.
In particular we are going to visualize the movement of a CTA train car
while going along the train line.
At minimum you should collect accelerometer (preferable in 3 dimenions)
data, GPS (location) data, clock (time) data.
Your first decision will be to pick a train line into or out of the
loop for study. The blue line west and the green line west are
pretty close to straight lines so those might make visualization
easier, but the choice is up to you.
To ensure you get good data I would suggest some redundancy in the data
collection, either with multiple devices doing the sensing, or riding
the same train out and back. The data should suggest a typical run on
the line, so it would be bad if the train had to make an emergency
stop. Ideally you would collect this data several times on the same
line and merge the data to get a common / average result. Your grade
will be partly based on the quality of the data collection so be sure
to spend enough time planning and testing out your data collection
approach.
Very likely between the various laptops and handhelds in your
possession you will have enough capability to do the data collection.
Once the group has collected and shared all the data you can move onto
doing each of your individual visualizations of that data.
For the visualization the user should be able to see a geographic
representation of the train line and be able to play / pause / shuffle
back and forth through that train run and simultaneously see what the
train car is doing, or see the entire run all at once. The
visualization should make the speed and acceleration (in various
directions) easy to see and understand.
Note that while vectors are one way of visualizing the acceleration
data, they may not be the best way.
By 11:59pm on
Thursday 5/5 (the day before the final exam) each person should create
a
web page of their results and email the location to Andy Again as
usual everyone should send
me a 320 x 240 jpg snapshot for the web.
During the final
exam period itself each student will have 10 minutes to describe their
visualization work and their findings.
last revision 3/15/11