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Geotagger World Atlas: Most Scenic City Routes Mapped Using Photo Data

16 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

tokyo

Tapping into geo-tagging data and the collective wisdom of photographers, you can use this interactive tool to follow in the footsteps of those who have mapped out the most beautiful routes through cities. Click to pan and zoom through London below:

Eric Fisher of Mapbox has spent years compiling data from Flickr users, turning their sequential geo-located uploads into paths through urban environments including San Francisco, Beijing, Istanbul and Tokyo.

san francisco

The result is the Geotaggers’ World Atlas, a data-driven compendium of paths to take through cities. It is more than just a connection of dots — Fisher’s interactive guides specifically highlight trajectories from one image to the next.

beijing

“It signifies that people went there in the first place,” he says, and “saw something worth taking a picture of, and put the extra effort into posting it online for others to appreciate. And a sequence of photos along a route is even more significant, because it indicates that someone sustained their interest over distance and time rather than taking one picture and turning back.”

istanbul

The results are predictable in some cases, tracing lines between major landmarks, but often show side routes off of beaten tourist paths where keen photographers have found fascinating architecture and landscapes worth documenting along their way.

[ By WebUrbanist in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Posted in Creativity

Crowdsourced Data Reveals Most Beautiful Urban Walking Routes

14 Jul

[ By WebUrbanist in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

best walking routes study

Using a mapping algorithm coupled with citizen reviews of sights and scenery, a team of researchers has developed a way to choose paths through cities based on beauty, quiet and happiness rather than simply the shortest distance between two points.

shortest or beautiful route

The project employed Google Street View and Geograph as well as Flickr images and their metadata to build out an initial estimation of probable best paths, then solicited human feedback (to check and enhance the results) from a group of participants on the website UrbanGems (shown above).

london main sites map

The study, published by Cornell University’s arXiv, came up with a number of route suggestions in Boston and London and contains a number of interesting findings. For starters, the ‘beautiful’ routes were only slightly longer than the shortest routes, and significantly shorter than typical tourist-oriented directions and guided-tour paths. As the algorithm improves, it is increasingly able to generate paths through new cities via metadata alone, reducing reliance on input from people.

beauty and shortest boston

boston main sights map

The project’s creators included Daniele Quercia and Luca Maria Aiello of Yahoo Labs in Barcelona and Rossano Schifanella of the University of Torino, Italy. From their abstract: “When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant.

beauty walking route london

shortest walking route london

The assessments are not simply qualitative value judgments, but a hybrid of human and machine input: “Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy.”

happy walking path london

quiet walking route london

From UrbanGems: “Buildings and neighbourhoods speak. They speak of egalitarianism or elitism, beauty or ugliness, acceptance or arrogance. The aim of UrbanGems is to identify the visual cues that are generally associated with concepts difficult to define such beauty, happiness, quietness, or even deprivation. The difficult task of deciding what makes a building beautiful, or what is sought after in a quiet location is outsourced to the users of this site using comparisons of pictures. With a comprehensive list of aesthetic virtues at hand, we would be more likely to systematically understand and re-create the environments we intuitively love.”