Aaron Cantrell
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The challenge of optimizing the traffic flow in a city is an incredibly complex and dynamic problem. If the transportation habits, infrastructure and workings of a city are considered as a scientific or mathematical model-able system, it's quickly realized that changing one variable (think a traffic light in one part of the city) has wide spread effects throughout the rest of the system. This is the challenge the traffic engineer faces; they work to find ways to control the flow of people transporting themselves around a city. In doing this, they deal with an infinitely complex system. I created a piece that reflects a system where when one thing is changed, the entirety of the system is affected in a way that is dependent on the distance to where the change occurred. Just as in life when a change occurs, it has lasting effects; thus my visualization doesn't reset itself, rather it continues evolving just as the traffic in a city does.

To view the piece, download the zip file and unzip its contents to a folder on your computer. Open up that folder and you will see three folders, click on the one corresponding to your operating system and then click on the file named "Traffic_Engineer_Dynamic_System". The visualization will launch and you can use your mouse to zoom (scroll wheel), rotate (left click) and pan (middle click/command click on a Mac) around the 3D space and view it from different angles. If you have issues opening the program, please ensure that you have a fairly current version of Java installed and a graphics card that is OpenGL compatible.