Project Metrobuzz

Project Metrobuzz is a software prototype under development at the Futures Cities Laboratory of ETH Zurich.

Agent based simulation tools such as MATSim and MITSIM allow us to achieve efficient and accurate predictions of crowd behavior, thereby increasing our understanding of urban systems and assist in urban planning. However, output produced by such simulation platforms are difficult to communicate to stakeholders such as government agencies and the general public due to their technical nature.

Project Metrobuzz offers a new and visually striking method of displaying and interacting with large amounts of simulation data in a way that is both scientifically interesting and understandable to a broader audience. It does this by generalizing trip origin-destination information as a series of line segments in 3D space that drawn on top of one another.

Users can use an Android tablet to select origin and destination zones and select the time period (e.g. 08:00 am - 10:00 am) of interest.

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W. Zeng, C. Zhong, A. Anwar, S. Müller Arisona and I. V. McLoughlin, MetroBuzz: Interactive 3D Visualization of Spatiotemporal Data, International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCIS) 2012 (paper)