Visualizing Air Traffic

A designer at UCLA took a period of air traffic control images and combined images from various moments to form a movie. The overall effect is a very psychedelic, time-lapse view of all the flights watched by air traffic control. What emerges is interesting patterns of flight activity. During different times of the day you see a flood of flights coming in from Europe. And at another part of the "movie" you see the Eastern sea-board of the US wake up, and then plane activity quickly spreads out across the country.

It gets back to what I was writing about earlier: I am often torn by the value and impact of technology. But I am most wowed by the impact of information technology. It allows me to see things, aggregate data and information, in ways that wouldn't be possible with our normal perceptory capacities.