This post follows the previous one on plugging Excel to Processing. As part of the Msc AAC I was presented with a task of visualizing data from scanning for blue-tooth devices in the city of Bath. I was working on this with Zeta Kachri, Ankon Mitra and Kensuke Hotta.

I’m skeptical about usefulness of the data from blue-tooth scanning as a mean of representation of any patterns of human presence in the city (since it turns out that only 8.5% of people have blue-tooth enabled in their devices). My group decided to try to explore the patterns of presence anyway. The generative procedure in Processing was driven by two parameters: number of scanned devices and (what we called) “persistence” of each device – the period for which it remained in the range of the scanner. We choose those parameters in order to represent places where people stay for longer period of time in opposite to places which majority of people just pass through. Next step might be an evaluation of the results of representation in the light of axial map analysis of the city of Bath coming from Space Syntax.

DXF exports from Processing needed a bit of tweaking with Rhinoscript before final export to STL.

The models where printed at the DMC London – a 3d printing centre located at the Bartlett School of Architecture. We have used a Z-Corp machine, but DMC offers a range of SLS machines from EOS too. I’m looking forward to using one of them next time.

We have chosen to print only the most representative data from the range of information provided by blue-tooth scan. You can see the whole set of data visualized in Processing underneath: