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IDAT101: Mapping project

19th March 2007

For our IDAT101 Mapping project my group and I decided to explore the mapping of a sporting event. After further research we decided we would map the possession and distribution of the ball and players during a football game.

This would work by splitting the football pitch into a number of segments. Each segment would then vary in tone of colour depending on the amount of action and number of players in that area. The more players there were in the more action or possession that segment had within the set time, the more visible the square was.

To start we first made a number of prototype designs to try and get an idea of how we were going to design the finished product and we also planned on how to record the position of the ball at each designated time slot. We agreed we would do it in 15 minute time intervals, which would mean we would have 6 different recording once the game was finished.

To record the position of the ball we decided on printing out a grid that was the same as our proposed final design. We would then mark each relevant segment when the ball was in possession of a player. We found that this worked well and had no problem recording the information.

This was then transfered into our final digital piece.

After our initial discussion with Mike about our idea we all agreed that it should be taken further and break out of the box a little more. You can see our initial ideas below.

You can see from this image how we developed our ideas from initially talking about monitoring building activity to eventually a football game. The next image shows how we planned to represent our results. The two examples are how we would record the results and then how we would convert these into coloured representations.

We then took this and made an initial prototype design, which we showed in our short presentation to Mike.

We all agreed however that we should try and take it further and venture away from the standard sort of shape and form as seen in the first design. So we went back to the pen and paper and worked on a new idea that was an extension of the above. We decided we would start to play with the idea of shape and size. What I mean by this is we would vary the size of each box as well as the colour depending on how recent the action had hit each segment. Large boxes would represent a segment where there had recently been action where as smaller boxes would represent boxes that had seen little action over the course of time.

You can see above initial sketches for our new idea, which we all agreed showed more potential then the original and would end up with much more interesting results. So we went with our original concept and sat down to watch a game of football and recorded in 15 minute intervals. We then transferred our recording into our final digital version.

You can see the final digital version here here.

I think our ideas for the project were interesting and original after a couple reiterations. Orignally our first ideas were perhaps a little bit boring, and had already been done in one form or another. After further extending these ideas though we came up with a new and original concept, that resulted in a number of interesting final designs.

I think it would also be good to take the idea even further in the future and perhaps turn the slides into a real-time representation of the football match. Boxes and colours could change on the fly in flash, perhaps fed with an XML feed or something, which updates the boxes every x amount of time. Exploring alternative shapes and colours may have also been an interesting path to have taken if time allowed such a thing. What we have though is a series of interesting and original looking slides, however depite not being able to do any of these previous ideas.

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