Journey On!

Journey On is a fantastic local transport website for Brighton and Hove. The site has been around for a year, and last week relaunched with a raft of new features and a new look.

To celebrate the launch of the new website Cogapp created a ‘dynamic doodle’ stretching between the east and west extremes of the city. Two cyclists spelled out the letters J O U R N E Y O N in real time by travelling a carefully mapped route, with their progress tracked by GPS and visualised at a special launch event at Brighton Station.

Tristan wrote a small application in Python to run on a Nokia Series 60 mobile phone, which communicated with an external bluetooth GPS device to find out the exact position of the cyclist. The application then relayed this position every 4 seconds to a webserver, which in turn plotted the phone position onto Google Earth in the form of a line and a giant yellow pencil. To see a video of the doodle click here or here.

To give the launch some visual impact a large pencil was transported across the city by one of the cyclists.

Cogapp also helped promote the event by coming up with some exciting designs for the event and by running a competition to encourage people to walk parts of the route and text in.