November 26, 2006
Flight Patterns
There are many people who view science and engineering as some sort of mysterious and arcane practice, as something akin to magic in certain ways. Others view the fields as mind numbingly dull, devoid of all creativity.
I, of course, have a very different take on the whole endeavor. Neither arcane, nor dull, merely the language of the physical world and with that language threads of poetry become apparent.
Though I have seen this data before (it is the patters of aircraft over the United States), the presentation is a marriage of art and technology, and something which I highly recommend.
The following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.
What interesting patterns it is that we create...