Micro-location data visualisation

So someone mapped the movements of themselves, their two young kids, and the cat, in their living room over the space of an hour, and produced this very lovely graphic:

The method seems terribly laborious to me:

I used a marked-out equally-spaced grid in masking tape and filmed them moving via video across the grid for an hour. I then reviewed the video and plotted their movements on each minute of the video’s timecode onto a ‘room map’ with corresponsing grid.

A real labour of love, and a beautiful and fascinating result. It reminds me of the maps you get from eye-tracking studies of websites.
This is exactly the sort of thing I want us to be able to do – without the heavyweight manual data processing – in our shiny new labs, open in April! We can set up the big lab as – say – a living room, and log what goes on when a bunch of users interact with some new technology or other to do a task.  Out of the box we’ve only got video capture, but it’s designed specifically to allow it to be kitted out to do this sort of thing – there’s any number of technologies we could use for the tracking.

(Via Kevin Kelly)