A blog post by Google gives details on how they will be releasing data that may help combat COVID-19. The same aggregated and anonymised data is used for Google Maps, and will be made publicly available to show how communities around the globe are moving around differently in response to COVID-19. It is hoped that making this data available may assist public health officials to make critical decisions to help combat the virus. The Community Mobility Reports released by Google chart movement trends over time in various locations such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
The reports from Google show a percentage change in the number of visits to different places compared to a baseline, and is taken from the users that have opted-in to location history for their Google account.
Figure 1: Example of Community Mobility Report from Google. Find your Community Mobility Report here: https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
We’ve uploaded the anonymised data from Google into 3D Repo to create a visual, interactive, and easy to understand model. Data is mapped geographically and visualised using the 3D Repo model viewer. The coloured bars represent each different category of activity in each location. The height of the bar represents the percentage decrease of people participating in each activity.
How did we do it?
- Extracted data points from the Google Community Mobility Report report for UK over several week to March 29th. The baseline is the median value for the corresponding day of the week, during the 5-day week period Jan 3 – Feb 6,2020.
- Created a script to add latitude and longitude values to a map of each location in the UK (where data is available).
- Executed a custom Python script to process extracted data through Rhino Compute in order to generate geometric representation.
- Upload to 3D Repo and federate with an underlying map.
Please note, to protect people’s privacy, Google ensures no personally identifiable information is made available at any point. The reports that have been made available by Google use aggregated, anonymised data.
3D Repo is standing by ready to help with interactive visualisation as required.
Please get in touch with us if you would like to know more: support@3drepo.com
