We’re somehow convinced that this problem statement came after Imran spent a day in the shopping mall with his girlfriend 

He wanted to be able to make something for shoppers to be able to navigate easily in a huge shopping mall, so went on to create Incarto — an indoor map for a shopping mall.

The process to get started was simple and interesting. The outline of the map was created from the image. Then it was exported into SVG and rendered onto browser. The SVG map was then changed using the D3.js framework to make it interactive.

Imran wanted to get started on the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format while tinkering and writing some code around D3.

Chennai’s Express Avenue shopping mall was chosen, because of the availability of an online map that makes it easier to sketch an accurate SVG and also because Imran was quite familiar with the mall.

He came up with the following map,

The stores get highlighted on click of the ‘types of store’ filter

The project is currently in it’s early stages is hosted at Github. You may contact Imran to work with him and contribute to this project.

Originally Published on October 24, 2013

Todd Schneider, who went on a recent road trip has used the R project to work on an interesting spatial challenge that finds out the most “concave” state in the US. The R project is a free environment for statistics and graphics.

The problem statement was to find the 2 points such that, a) both the points are in the same state, b) a straight line connecting them crosses most number of states.

He worked around to decrease the number of sample points of boundary around a state to keep the data enough to conclude on the solution.

This project can also be extended to determine the most concave state in other countries.

The data used was from the GADM database and can be downloaded freely. The R script is also available as a Github Gist.

An animation of the method used to calculate is shown below.

[via Rap Genius Engineering Team]

Originally Published on September 27, 2013

He captured observations from the rendering and also mentions that, “there is a lot of improvement over the last decade”.

You can explore, fork and tinker around his code from the Github repository. The interactive demo can be found here.

Originally Published on September 21, 2013