Hotels of the World: Soap & a Globe
C++ and openframeworks was a whole new can or worms for me. I knew it would be tricky and I was not let down.
It began with linker errors on provided examples. I switched from VS to codeBlocks and was much happier. From there I needed to tackle the data. I quickly learned that real world data is not clean. Our dataset had NULLs scattered throughout, random unfilled sections and unlikely hotel addresses. For both of my attempts to visualize the data I did much cleaning and reduction before loading into the programs.
Attempt 1: Globe
I took the simple approach of mapping hotel locations to a globe. The globe image was logical and the red dots showed well. Simple zoom, tilt and pan is implemented.
Attempt 2: Bars of Soap
I got to thinking about hotels and I remembered all those bars of soap. Every morning at every hotel I’ve been too I get a new bar of soap even if the one I used the night before is in fine condition. I used this as inspiration. Hotel capacity by country was mapped to the area of the bars of soap in the visualization. The data being of US origin was skewed heavily towards the US and common US tourist destinations. Nonetheless it is interesting to note the shear volume of soap spent daily. This may be a gross approximation but I imagine the order of magnitude is close enough. I went for the pile of soap because this is a pile of disposed bars of soap. The user can pick-up the bars of soap.