SBIR Phase I: Animated Real-Time Road Traffic Visualization for Broadcast and the Internet

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will provide practical tools for visualizing real-time road traffic data and computer-generated traffic simulations using 2D and 3D animation for broadcast and the Internet. Except for weather forecasts, data-driven animations are rarely produced in real-time from live data. Traffic visualization contains more challenges than weather visualization. The objective of this project is to determine the feasibility of building practical, fully functional tools to access data in a timely fashion and produce a compelling animation within seconds. This tool must model traffic incidents and flow in a timely and accurate fashion. The anticipated result includes animation and video-production tools that will be converted to a commercial product during Phase II. Potential applications include TV broadcasts, traffic control centers, police dispatch centers, and visualization tools for transportation studies and planning. In addition, the animation principles derived from this project could be applicable to visualizing other real-time data in an animation. The first application is broadcast television, for morning traffic segments. Further applications include traffic control centers, dispatches, and tools for transportation planning. A third domain of application is information dissemination on small-screen displays (PDA, etc) when the bandwidth and market materialize.