Who is Callum Prentice I hear you ask, well it’s what I heard myself asking when I saw an article in, of all places, The Daily Mail : Watch the world’s ‘swarming’ flight paths in action: Beautiful multicoloured visualisation reveals air traffic across the globe.
So the answer as to who Callum Prentice is comes in the article :
The British-born developer currently works for 3D Virtual World Second Life in California and has released the code for his Flight Stream design, as well as his other interactive projects, on his website.
Then we land at the website, we finally find out who Callum Prentice is! Hurrah!
British bloke, in San Francisco via London, Singapore, Barcelona, and Hong Kong ● Second Life developer during the day since 2004 ● Enthusiastic WebGL hacker in the evenings ● Founder of Industrial Might and Logic Combat Robots ● Eager traveller ● Crossfit and indoor rowing aficionado ● Insanely happy husband and father.
As Callum has been at Linden Lab since 2004 he’s an oldbie, he’s been there for a long time, seen a lot of changes and I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t know what Callum Linden does. However it appears he was involved at some point in bringing HTML on a prim to Second Life. Callum has a strong interest in WebGL.
However back to his flight stream, as that’s what’s making the news :
The site was created as an ‘experiment to map many of the airline flights between world airports,’ explained Mr Prentice.
Tools on the site let visitors control the opacity of the individual flight tracks, change the size of the airports as well as adjust the speed of the animation.
The animation has been designed for desktop browsers, but Mr Prentice has also created a video for people on mobiles to be able to view the animation.
Mr Prentice told MailOnline the visualisation was just a hobby, and admitted that there is so much data around major airports, ‘it just blurs into a mess’, but the visualisation was fun to do and ‘looks pretty.’
However besides looking pretty, flight stream is fascinating as it shows just how many flights are in the sky.
An article on Flight Stream published at Geek has more information : Worldwide flights visualization shows how busy our skies really are :
But better than just looking at the data is visualizing it, and that’s exactly what software engineer Callum Prentice has done using WebGL in a web browser. You can see the results by visiting his Flight Stream page, but be warned if you have a slower computerit may take a while to load, or fail to. You also need a browser that support WebGL, which most modern browsers do.
You can play about with some controls on your view, changing the size of the pixels, or changing the track opacity so that you can see where flights are going more clearly, or less clearly, depending upon your view.
This certainly does look pretty. However if flights in the sky don’t do it for you, there are a lot of other things to play with on Callum’s website. They include :
ISS Photo Viewer
Displays the shooting location and contents of all (1.4 million+) photos taken from the International Space Station since the first mission in October 2000 up to the present day.
Storm Tracks WebGL
Interactive map of hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tropical storm tracks from 1848 to 2013 including Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda.
Connected Planet
Lat/long connected spline based arcs over planet Earth with logo, tweening and UI.
There’s a lot more, if this sort of thing interests you, it’s worth a look. Another point to consider is whether WebGL will play a part in Linden Lab’s nextgen virtual world, as Callum demonstrates, it has a lot of power.
There’s also a bonus for Linden Lab in all of this, even though the articles aren’t about their products or company, they get a mention anyway and maybe Callum should be treated to a bonus beer or two!