Taxi Visualization for 6.885: Lab 8

Questions:

1. What is the message in your visualization and what techniques did you use to illustrate it?

   I show a "heat map" of taxi pickups in Boston. This shows where people are picking up taxis in the city.

   I increased the transparency of the points to be able to illustrate areas that had more taxi activity than others. For example, Boylston Street seems like a good place to be.

   Some interesting features are the road grid that is recovered simply by taxi pickups, and the clear "islands" of activity, corresponding to different airports, at Logan Airport.

2. If you used interaction or animation, how does it facilitate the user's understanding?

   There is no animation in this visualization, but showing time slices of taxi activity could be interesting.

3. What format is the data that is used by the visualization? Is it the raw data or did you need to compute some summary or derived data product?

   I subsampled the raw data due to memory constraints, but did not do any other computation on the data.