5 Minutes in the Life of a Sidewalk

The above visualization, created by interaction designer Jaak Kaevats, captures five minutes in the life of a narrow slice of streetscape in Tokyo. The pedestrians passing through it are plotted as if on a timeline. Their identities have been digitally blurred, but their demographics – old men, young women, small children – remain visible. Collectively, this static picture of their movement reveals the rhythm of a Tokyo street, with its dense foot traffic, mix of ages, both businessmen and shoppers.

As part of a masters thesis at the Interface Cultures Lab in Austria, Kaevats has created such visualizations from street-scapes all over Japan and now in some parts of Europe. He uses a custom software program that renders video footage of each location into a 5-minute timeline, with each row of visual data illustrating 30 seconds in time.