Wanderlust: 3D Impressionism in Human Journeys

The movements of individuals are fundamental to building and maintaining social connections. This pictorial presents Wanderlust, an experimental three-dimensional (3D) data visualization on the universal visitation pattern revealed from large-scale mobile phone tracking data. It explores ways of visualizing recurrent flows and the attractive places they implied. Inspired by the 19th-century art movement Impressionism, we develop a multi-layered effect, an ‘impression’, of mountains emerging from consolidated flows, to capture the essence of human journeys and urban spatial structure.