Get Lost in Paris' Metro System With This Gorgeous 3-D Station Map

Regular maps of Paris' large, incredibly intricate subway system can get overwhelming to look at very fast, but a gorgeous, interactive website makes it much easier on your eyes by rendering those maps through stunning 3-D graphics and commuting stats.
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Image courtesyMetropolitain.io

Regular maps of Paris' large, incredibly intricate subway system can get overwhelming to look at very fast, but a gorgeous, interactive website makes it much easier on your eyes by rendering those maps through stunning 3-D graphics and commuting stats.

The service, Metropolitain.io, wasn’t a commissioned project, nor was it a specific client request -- it was the side project of French tech startup Dataveyes. Since the studio’s birth in 2010, it’s done a number of data-centric projects for companies like Google, BorderCloud and l’Express, but Metropolitain.io gave the team members a chance to experiment to find the best way to take even the coldest data and create an inviting, user-centric visualization. They worked on it in between their other jobs; having no set deadline gave them the flexibility and enthusiasm to play around with different visualization techniques like map distortions and 3-D effects.

Not only was Metropolitain.io different because it was on Dataveyes’ own time frame, its design process was also completely unique from the studio's regular projects. For starters, they didn’t bother with wireframes or other preplanning -- instead, they went straight to prototyping the site. Using traffic datasets provided by public RATP (Autonomous Operator of Parisian Transports) reports and the API of another French startup called Isokron that shows estimated travel times, the team plunged into figuring out how what the data could show the public about the accessibility of the Paris metro system, and the best way for them to visualize it.

According to Francois Xavier Fringant, one of the designers at Dataveyes, they spent a lot of time squeezing out as much information as possible from the data, and playing with the site’s interface modeling.

“The design phase enabled us to make that data come to life, make it usable, in a way that’s both engaging and detailed,” Fringant says. “We tried to find the right balance between aesthetics and relevance, to design a visualization that would serve our users' purposes.”

Metropolitain.io shows all 16 lines of the Paris metro system, and you can choose to view all the lines together or only selected lines, and in 2-D or 3-D. Selecting the "Time View" option lets you see how many stations are accessible from a specific point at a certain departing time, for every five-minute interval. But the "Crowd View" is arguably the more interesting of the two, turning the grid into a blotchy heat map to show traffic stats for every area and station of the metro. Using the map with Crowd View in 3-D mode lets you appreciate all the visual complexities of the data and the design. Click and drag to see the map at different angles, showing the train lines almost hovering over canyons of brightly colored traffic mountains. Select a specific station to see the number of people that traveled through it in 2011, with a line graph comparing it to all the other stations.

Image courtesy

Metropolitain.io

Dataveyes plans to update the site once the newest datasets are released to the public. The studio also has plans to test Metropolitain.io on large touchscreens in the near future, provided the hardware is available. They would like to eventually partner with city metro stations to have Metropolitain.io displayed on interactive screens to serve the needs of metro users, which isn’t too much of a stretch considering New York City's initiative to place 90 touchscreen kiosks with interactive maps in subway stations. If that were to happen, Paris commuters would not only be able to see estimated travel times between destinations, but they could also see the amount of traffic at each station.

The first showing of Metropolitain.io on a big screen will be at Paris' Futur en Seine Festival in June, where Dataveyes will be exhibiting it in a gallery along with a few other digital projects.

With all the plans to expand Metropolitain.io, however, none of them involve optimizing the site for mobile use. Currently the site isn’t compatible for cellphones or tablets, and Fringant says that was a conscious UX choice, to make sure the project didn’t lose touch with the inspiration at its core -- the idea of the “connected city” and how data can shape the way we interact with and view the city spaces we use every day.

“It is meant to be an immersive, reflective but enjoyable experience, and we hope it gets people to rethink the way they see the metro map, which is such an essential component of their daily life,” Fringant says. “Data helps uncover actual meaning on our activities, our habits and our environments. Visualization can connect the dots, make you comprehend information that sometimes you wouldn’t even see from ground level.”