Journey On!

Journey On is a fantastic local transport website for Brighton and Hove. The site has been around for a year, and last week relaunched with a raft of new features and a new look.

To celebrate the launch of the new website Cogapp created a 'dynamic doodle' stretching between the east and west extremes of the city. Two cyclists spelled out the letters J O U R N E Y O N in real time by travelling a carefully mapped route, with their progress tracked by GPS and visualised at a special launch event at Brighton Station.

 

Tristan wrote a small application in Python to run on a Nokia Series 60 mobile phone, which communicated with an external bluetooth GPS device to find out the exact position of the cyclist. The application then relayed this position every 4 seconds to a webserver, which in turn plotted the phone position onto Google Earth in the form of a line and a giant yellow pencil. To see a video of the doodle click here or here.

JourneyOn GPS Doodle

To give the launch some visual impact a large pencil was transported across the city by one of the cyclists.

Journey On Pencil

Cogapp also helped promote the event by coming up with some exciting designs for the event and by running a competition to encourage people to walk parts of the route and text in.

JourneyOn Designs

Comments

In an extremely appropriate twist of fate, Kevin Meredith, the photographer who documented the event, has just been given his very own location-sensing bicycle as part of Yahoo!'s PurplePedals campaign.

His bike is more sophisticated than the simple phone-on-handlebars system we used for the Journey On re-launch event, in that it includes a camera that uploads images automatically, as well as featuring solar panels for battery charging.

See the bike's location or the bike's photos for more.

[...] quick lunch, it was over to the core business of hacking. For our project, Andy and I reworked the Journey On GPS Doodle codebase to create a game of realworld Tron. For this, I hooked up a laptop displaying Google [...]

[...] our Journey On GPS drawing look tiny, but then we’re a bit suspicious of all the curls in this [...]

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