It's related to the game's story. In the game, Chicago is interconnected with a computer system that allows one to control city infrastructure and eavesdrop on people. I guess the site is showcasing the eavesdropping part, in a case of life imitates art.
Surely it's already art imitating life, just because they've then looked backwards and shown the life example that's similar to the art it doesn't make it life imitating art?
So one of the sources listed is http://opencellid.de/ and there are similar services for the other countries tracking mobile phones.
Can anyone familiar with this explain how this type of service is possible?
From my limited understanding, it seems like these services all track / utilize cell phone base stations, which I understand to essentially be the device that connects you to the network. But how do they identify the positions of all of the mobile devices utilizing each station? Is this something that is openly broadcasted by the base stations?
The maps on the OP's posting only show the location of cell base stations, not the positions of mobile devices. There is more of them than you realise...
Today with the same browser, there is stuff that wasn't there yesterday: blue symbols, the outlines of boroughs, click through, the works. Most likely their servers were choking under the load yesterday and failing to supply many of the data sets.
By far the most interesting thing is the overlay of map with tweets. I'm using a cinema display, so can't say I have problems reading small type. Although the color scheme looks very Blade Runner, it makes overlaying only a few options difficult to grok. Scrolling is slow.
Still impressed this was rolled out for a video game. Have there been any other presentations like this in the past?
I find it especially helpful to add location when posting a photo of some landmark or public event. I wouldn't tag tweets by location when I'm at home, but if I'm out it's a neat way to complement the tweet.
Looks like it's done in Flash. Still very impressive but would have been even cooler if it was all JS/webgl/canvas voodoo. Would love to know where they're getting some of the data from (e.g. the bikes and atm locations).
Hmm, if they are, they're elaborately faking to the extent of making up sources in the footer. I'll take a look tonight if there is a CCTV camera where they claim there is and let you know!
Let out a "what year is this" comment myself when the flash player started loading.
I was able to get it running on Chrome 35/Mavericks, but now that it's loaded I'm not sure what I'm suppose to do... I can see old tweets and their location in relation to ATMs or traffic lights? Woo?
It looks amazing but getting data from a twitter mainstream with geolocalized tweets as other social data as well is not difficult to implement. In my opinion the key is how to create that map from scratch.
