Re-creating WarGames With Tableau And Mapbox

Re-creating WarGames with Tableau and Mapbox

So you all remember the film “Wargames”:

Well, we (Jeffrey Shaffer, Anya A’Hearn, Chris DeMartini and I) decided to build a tribute to it.  Except instead of using a Hewlett Packard 9845 and an IMSAI we’d use Mapbox, Tableau, CSS3, Javascript, HTML5, GDAL, and rather a lot of data, and quite a bit of math:

Find Chris DeMartini’s blog post here.

View the  IMSAI here.

View the animated WOPR here.

View the Война Операция План реагирования here.

Find out how Chris DeMartini added WOPR’s voice using Jeffrey Shaffer’s voice commands for Tableau (called “Tabitha”) here.

Mercator View

Polar Projection View

WOPR

Война Операция План реагирования

Overview of the screens from the Film

(Left Hand Side) Close Up of the screens from the Film

(Right Hand Side) Close Up of the screens from the Film

The Story.

“No rush, but can you send me the arc equation you have used in the past formapping with arcs instead of straight link paths?” Asked Chris DeMartini.  “Of course!” I said, and sent Chris to over some links on Wikipedia and an R package.  The fact was, I’d always used ESRI to generate Great Circles.  But Chris has been doing some amazing stuff in Tableau with bezier curves, and drawing Great Arcs native was his next challenge.

Imagine my surprise when he said - “have you got anything to go with to test this out in Tableau?” and “ Still needs work, but 1 hour in I have great circles calced on tableau… Thanks for the references!” - so I sent him the World Bank Global Migration 2000 data.  You can view that output here.

Viewing that visualization reminded me of WarGames. I sent an email to Chris:

“The other piece I was thinking was "war games” - the film is a bit old, but…if we geolocate this : The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists - Worldwide Deployment of Nuclear Weapons as the origins (and the destinations are geonames cities1000.txt) in ranked pop order…” then we could visualize a nuclear Armageddon.” and added this picture:

and of course, we’d want a Mapbox map styled by Anya A’Hearn to bring the 1980′s cold war vector graphics up to date, so another email was sent: “I’d hope we could go for something like this:”

Game on, and boy, did Anya deliver.

Talking about Games, Joshua Milligan had previously created a Tableau version of Tic-Tac-Toe, 

and Chris also wanted to build out the “launch code sequence”:

 - so these were both incorporated into the design.

The Data.

Geocoded Nuclear Sites from Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, supplemented with FAS.org and Wikipedia

Surface to Air Missile (SAM) Sites (KML) (courtesy: IMINT)

SAM Range Rings (KML) (courtesy: IMINT)

Russian Airforce Bases (KML)  (courtesy: IMINT)

Chinese Airforce Bases (KML)  (courtesy: IMINT)

Air Sectors (US Only) (Shapefile) (courtesy: FAA)

US Bases (ESRI Shapefile) (courtesy: Data.gov)

Iranian Airforce Bases (KML) (courtesy Airpower.at)

Geonames

The Processes.

Web Design.

A semi-responsive template in the style of the WarGames film was designed in CSS3.  I used some 3d transforms to “bend” the screens inwards, and modal windows.  Thanks to: @desandro

I also created some responsive circular divisions based from this design, except I modified it for (mobile and multiple) viewports.

Javascript was used to call the Tableau Visualizations, animate the dashboards, and also to generate the UTC clocks.

Data Design.

The majority of the nuclear sites were geocoded by hand by using Mapbox Satellite View and/or Google Maps.  For example, the hardened aircraft shelters at Kleine Brogel in Belgium:

But that left the rather tricky issue of dealing with the target sites.  That was made slightly less ambiguous when this happened. Apart from the introduction of ICBM’s, MIRV’s and SLBM’s since 1959, and the number of countries participating in this MADness…has anything else really changed, other than the time it would take to blow us all to Kingdom Come?

Also: for the Polar Projection: I used GDAL ogr2ogr to convert the ESRI Shapefiles from Mercator: thanks for the advice from Matt Irwin of Mapbox!

Possible Improvements: 

Regress targets by using GDELT sentiment

Use a population within (blast yield) radius algo

Burst/tween the REDIS Tableau cache for animation