Heat Maps in Flash

Two and a half years ago, I rendered a large heat map representing almost 100,000 Digg users and the 300,000 friendships between them. I used PHP/GD2 to render the image and it took quite a while to render. Due to the difficulty of redrawing it, the heat map was never updated. It would have been great if the heat map reflected current information, but instead it got to live on as a snapshot taken in 2007.

Since then, I’ve wondered about ways of rendering heat maps on the fly, ideally using the visitor’s CPU. Finally, in November, I was able to hack together a highly optimized Flash application that produces pretty awesome-looking heat maps (if I do say so myself) within a second or two.

Check it out

I’m afraid I’m going to have to be a bit of a tease for now, and not dive into too much technical detail. This project is part of a series of data visualizations that utilize a specific, lesser-known feature in Flash.

3 Replies to “Heat Maps in Flash”

  1. Hi Brian, came across your “hey ya” typogragphy video from stumbleupon a year ago and have been keeping tabs on your stuff since, and this looks like it’s going to be an interesting project!

    Btw just saw the docu “Helvetica”, and as an marketer this was a preception altering experience

  2. Hi Brian. I’m working on a heatmap project in Flash right now. Quite difficult to find anything that looks well done. If I’m right that the above image is generated from your flash heatmap app, then it’s looking really good. The link to bitgravity is dead – can you share any detail on how you made this heatmap? Best regards, Bob

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