UPDATE: Since Yahoo! has shut down may of the services that Trip Tracker relied upon I have replaced the live links with some real example images that I captured over the years.
Trip tracker is a quick hack that I created using the FireEagle location platform from Yahoo! Research Berkeley and is designed to convery a quick summary or what I’m doing during my summer holiday. The first part is a badge image (above) that shows you some quick summary about my current location. It shows you the following things
Location: A map tile of my location which zooms appropriately based on the accuracy of the available location. This is obtained from the wonderful Yahoo! Map Image API. It also prints out the location in text. I seem to be running into some rate limiting issues with this api so the image may not always load.
Weather: This is collected from the Yahoo! Weather API and is displayed as an icon along with the temperature in Fahrenheit. the icon respect sunrise/sunset times and updates based on the lighting in that location.
Time: Current time in MY (not your) location
Photographs: This is my favourite part of the badge and its a best guess as to the Flickr image most relevant for my current context. The algorithm searches Flickr in the following order
- Get my most recent photograph (limit 1 hour)
- Get the last photo I took in this location (5 mile radius)
- Get the Flickr geotagged image that is closest to my current location
Detail page
If you click on the badge image you are taken to the detail page which is a really really ugly HTML page I created that includes an interactive AJAX map of my current location as well as a flash flickr widget with my latest public photos
Caching
To prevent my server from melting down the processing for the map tiles and flickr images is only done once every five minutes – if you want an updated location just wait for a few seconds or visit the detail page which shows live location on every refresh.
Tomorrow I will be leaving for a 2 week driving holiday that will take me from Oakland all the way to Vancouver and back. I will be updating my location using my ZoneTag phone and you should be able to follow my trip using the trip tracker. If you’d like to develop against the location data from my trip you can access the live data here (the most interesting part will probably be when I drive the 900 miles from Oakland to Seattle on the 16th). I will be leaving my location publicly accessible all through London hack day and possibly during the entire trip as well. Do let me know if you hack up with something cool.
P.S.: A huge thanks to Beste Nazilli for helping out with the visual look and feel of the badge – as you can probably tell she did NOT have anything to do with the detail page 🙂
[tags]location, lbs, badge, track, trip tracker, fireeagle, flickr, yahoo, maps, weather, research[/tags]
5 replies on “Trip tracker”
[…] Last night, we discovered our work on TagMaps / World Explorer won best paper at ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). Rahul’s in British Colombia where he presented the paper, World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections. […]
How do I get this for my website!?!
By being extra very nice to me?
Right now its a fairly simple PHP script so you could pretty easily stick the script onto another server with your personal info (flickr + fireeagle) and you’d be ready to go.
[…] I’m not actually sure what it does, except that it powers an application from a Yahoo Researcher named Trip Tracker. […]
[…] A few weeks ago Rahul created the Trip Tracker badge for a driving trip he made up to Vancouver. It uses FireEagle to get location data and then pulls in the current weather and a recent nearby flickr photo. […]