Collected particle media

Attached are some videos taken from the particle map view of the dartmouth campus suffix tree data.

This animation
shows the entire dataset represented as a particle map. Each location (A) is emitting a particles to each location (B) that people travelled to directly after being at A. The number of particles is proportional to the number of people who made that traversal. The colouring of the particles is relative to the number of people too, thus the hotter colours show more popular trails and the cooler colours show less popular trails.

This is a video showing the result of filtering the suffix tree first to show only a single starting location. With the canvas being less cluttered you can really start to see the relationships between landmarks.

As a final note there are still some problems with this firstly there are random pixels lighting up causing a flashing and introducing false points, I am not quite sure yet what is causing this. Secondly I think it would be nice to not make the number of particles on a trail to be proportional not only to the user count or probability but also to the distance between the ends of the trail. Thus the particle density becomes the representation of the popularity. I suspect this would make for a more intuitive representation as well as better revealing the direction on short and popular trails which get a bit lost.