About Pathicular

Pathicular is a school project from a course called Information Visualisation at The Royal Institute of Technology. The main task of this project was to visualize information of our choice, with the constraint of it being runnable on any device. Pathicular uses the Google Maps API and d3.js to visualize a user's Google localization history, according to location and time.

Pathicular is designed with two views that are linked to each other: a map and a timeline. These two views visualize the same data, but each provides the user with a different insight: the map shows us an overview of the user's individual location history, which is clustered (depending on distance) into a few relevant places, each of them mapped onto a circle on the map. On the timeline, each row represents one place, giving us the dimension of time: we can see exactly when the user spends time there, and for how long he stays. These two views are connected: moving along the timeline by playing or brushing will result in changes on the map; you'll be able to see movement between each circle, the animation representing the transportation between the places.

Google already gives us the possibility to visualize our location history on a map, on a bar-chart or on a table. But there's only so much information we can display on a 2D map: it gets crowded really quick. Pathicular linearizes space and displays only selected places clustered from the user's history, making it easier to understand the data, and to analyze it further thanks to the timeline, which is an effective way of displaying the name of each place, the time spent there and the transportation time; in just one view.