Cycle

Cheng Fu & Kotaro Hara

Do you know where in your city you can bike?

There aren’t many ways to know where you can go with your bike

We make a mobile app that allows cyclists to collaboratively collect data about where they can travel by bicycle

A convenient tool for cyclists as a community to know where they can bike in prior to their trip (*)

Why do people care?

A tool that can be used by policy-makers, planners, and the public to promote cycling (**)

(*) cyclopath.org(**) Winters, M. (2012) Bike Score: Applying Research to Build Web-Based Tools to Promote Cycling

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Google Map Bicycle Route

Sparse data! Also, it tells you where you can go, but does not inform how nice roads are

There are prototypical solutions such as Geowiki’s where cyclists can collaboratively update information about

bicycle accessible routes

Geowiki is nice, but it is hard to attract people to proactively enter data :’( Also, post-hoc reviews are the

only way to provide information about how nice paths are

How can we make data collection activity more engaging so people want to help us collect data?

We want to make a fun mobile app that people could use while they are biking so we can collect data (bike

path locations, road conditions, road aesthetics) in background

Fog of WorldThe app visualizes where the user have and have not visited on a map. It also gives a user badges as they explore the world.

Purple PedalsThe system locates a position of a bicycle, take a picture, and send it to Flickr. It allows you to track your cycling activity.

We make a Fog of World like app that visualizes where users have and have

not been and persuade them to explore the world.

We could also monitor information about users’ travel (e.g. how fast you are traveling and how long you have traveled on the day) and give users

real-time feedback.

System Structure

We equipped a bike with an Android phone to collect pictures and other types of data

Galaxy Nexus on the bike handle

A phone holder

Back Camera

Accelerometer

GPS

Gyroscope

MapView interface we created

The white area with variable transparency represents the area that you have not traveled

The area you have traveled becomes visible on the map.

A line with variable colorcould visualize different attributes, e.g. how fast youtraveled.

StatsView Prototype

Speed of a bicycle was calculated by Haversine Formula with GPS coordinatesSpeed

12 km/h

This is a prototype. We completed the backend to get camera preview and other sensor data, but not the interface to show these information

Constantly taking pictures

We developed the background program so it can constantly capture pictures. But these pictures were taken manually with

the default camera app as our app kept on crashing

Difficulties 1

We realized that a phone screen becomes hard to see if we try to set a pose of a phone so the back camera

can capture pictures with good composition.

Difficulties 2

Sampling frequencyHow often should we collect data?

And for continuous data (accelerometer and gyroscope), how long should we collect data for each

segment?

Future Work

Make a UI

Utilize data collected from gyroscope and accelerometer for analyzing road conditions

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