Reports

Reports is a 3D data visualization work that uses AQI and weather data for each city to influence a 3D shape to visualize the current air and weather conditions.

Produced by: Liwen Wang

Introduction:

As a data visualization work, the project selected the capitals and a few scattered cities (22 cities in total) of the top 10 countries in terms of GDP in 2022 and 4 countries in the bottom 50 in terms of GDP in 2022 to visualize their real-time air quality and weather data in a 3d way.

Concept and Background Research:

Air pollution theme:

In an article published by WHO in April 2022, it is stated that billions of people are still breathing unhealthy air. Data also shows that the number of people killed each year by air pollution is far more than twice as high as the number of deaths due to COVID-19. The issue of air pollution will continue to take centre stage as the country develops and climate changes. (Air pollution kills millions - it's time to tackle it seriously, 2022)

“The air in 17% of cities in high-income countries falls below the WHO’s Air Quality Guidelines for PM2.5 or PM10.In low- and middle-income countries, air quality in less than 1% of the cities complies with WHO recommended thresholds.” (Billions of people still breathe unhealthy air: new WHO data, 2022). Accordingly, the pollution index of high GDP countries will be relatively low compared to low GDP countries. 

Data visualization:

“Data visualization is the representation of data through the use of common graphics, such as charts, plots, infographics, and even animations. These visual displays of information communicate complex data relationships and data-driven insights in a way that is easy to understand.” (Education, 2021)

When doing the visualizations, we should know who our audience is, set the context, and then choose an effective visual to show the data. For the data visualization on air quality and weather, most of them are done through heat map model. Like whoairquality and UK AIR. This visualization visualizes the data by location, which provides a favourable way for a country to monitor its own data and facilitates comparisons of air quality across regions.

   

And what If we put multiple series of data together and make the vision more beautiful and vivid. There are some artworks using this method, for instance: Will MacNeil’s 2d weather visualization, Entagma’s Flight Paths visualization and Craig Taylor’s bus service patterns visualization during the pandemic. Unlike traditional data visualizations with icons or maps, these visualizations use more vivid images or animations to visualize the individual data. 

Technical Implementation

Database:

The whole project started with some. Jason files from two open data websites: open weather and the World Air Quality Project Group. These two sites provide weather and air quality databases for almost all cities in the world: the open weather site allows one to get real-time weather conditions for each city, while the World Air Quality Project Group site provides detailed information on air pollution conditions (real-time data over a period of one to two hours). Then in order to be able to get data in real-time, it is necessary to find data that is common to the files of each city: for the air pollution, the project choose AQI and Pm25 index; for the weather, temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, wind degree and humidity index were chosen. (As the whole project was aimed at visualizing air quality, only air pollution-related data was initially selected, but due to the relatively small amount of common data, it was eventually decided to add weather data for better visualization). 

Software using and data-to-visual transformation:

The whole project only uses one software called Houdini. This software allows for data import and procedural modelling. The main language it uses is Python and Houdini’s own programming language called VEX.

According to the data visualization method, the first thing that needs to be clear is who your audience is, this visualization model needs to be oriented to various populations (from young to old), then shapes and colours can be used as the main visualization elements:

The shape of PM25 as the main polluting particulate matter can be used as a visual shape to start with (Irregular particle shape), choosing a 3d presentation will be more impactful than a 2d approach.

Besides, visualization requires a context, and the data to be visualized needs to be placed in a context that corresponds to the data and in which its story can be told and developed. The change in colour and status of a tree throughout its life cycle from new growth to final dieback is relatively visual and salient. Whereas air pollution affects the health of life, by analogy, the rise and fall of a tree's life as a high or low air pollution index may be a more meaningful data-to-visual conversion. Following are some experiments on colours:

In order to make the whole visual more vivid, data of wind speed and wind direction are added to the visual aspect to make the whole shape move, while putting in the atmospheric pressure magnitude to influence the size of the whole visual shape and atmospheric humidity to influence the density of the shape. All these data are related to the air and affect the whole state of the air.

The amount of PM25 is transformed into the number of particles attached to the city name and affects the visibility of the city name (like the actual situation of pm25 affecting visibility).

Reflection and Future Development

The entire project was ultimately visualized, and the audience feedback showed that the entire visualization was meaningful and effective. The format also preserves the interest, which in some feedback was called "beautiful shapes". However, there is a difference of opinion regarding the ambiguity of the text. some viewers thought this was a very good form of treatment, but others recognized that the word was not clearly visible and affected interpretation.

The whole project succeeded in catching the data in real-time and in exploring new directions of data visualization.

The unfortunate part of the whole project is that there is no time to complete the interface of real-time interaction, so the effect of real-time input text output animation is not fully completed. Therefore, in the future, this aspect of interaction will be the first director of development. Secondly, there are only 22 cities in the project with single-day data, which is relatively small. Later, we will try to collect data from only a few cities over time for comparison, so that we can better observe the air changes in a city over time and visualize the data over time for comparison.

 

Reference

Education, I., 2021. What is Data Visualization? [online] Ibm.com. Available at: <https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/data-visualization> [Accessed 10 February 2021].

Entagma, 2019. Visualizing Flight Paths in Houdini. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihmX_vr1hJ8&t=3s> [Accessed 5 September 2022].

Houdini, 2021. Painting with Data | Will MacNeil | OFFF HIVE. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhVRiK9Y0w&t=210s> [Accessed 5 September 2022].

Taylor, C., 2021. Craig Taylor—Outlier 2021—3d Geo Data Viz: From Insight to Data Art. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxmqG_jxJiw> [Accessed 19 March 2021].

Uk-air.defra.gov.uk. 2022. Home - Defra, UK. [online] Available at: <https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/> [Accessed 5 September 2022]. 

Who.int. 2022. Billions of people still breathe unhealthy air: new WHO data. [online] Available at: <https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2022-billions-of-people-still-breathe-unhealthy-air-new-who-data> [Accessed 4 April 2022].

Whoairquality.shinyapps.io. 2022. National Air Quality Standards. [online] Available at: <https://whoairquality.shinyapps.io/AirQualityStandards/> [Accessed 5 September 2022].

World Economic Forum. 2022. Air pollution kills millions - it's time to tackle it seriously. [online] Available at: <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/air-pollution-killing-millions-how-can-we-tackle/> [Accessed 25 May 2022].

Data and working reference:

Azure, S., 2022. Crusader - Ambient/Chill Out (Stable Diffusion AI art). [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tngdzuhGYX4> [Accessed 8 September 2022].

Openweathermap.org. 2022. Сurrent weather and forecast - OpenWeatherMap. [online] Available at: <https://openweathermap.org/> [Accessed 8 September 2022].

project, T., 2022. Real-time air pollution index for 100+ countries. [online] aqicn.org. Available at: <https://aqicn.org/here/#!gl!51.5176228!-0.0557553> [Accessed 8 September 2022]. 

Python, R., 2022. Python’s Requests Library (Guide) – Real Python. [online] Realpython.com. Available at: <https://realpython.com/python-requests/> [Accessed 8 September 2022].