My shortest paths app for Vassar College

April 14th, 2011

I’ve finished the first online version of my application which finds shortest walking paths on the Vassar campus. It uses Dijkstra and the Google Maps Javascript API to find and plot the shortest route between dorms, academic buildings, and student centers. I’m hoping for some feedback from online testing before I submit the final version as part of my senior research project. I’ve solved a lot of arguments about quickest ways to class already!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2011 at 8:55 am and is filed under College, Projects, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • http://twitter.com/FosterRanney Foster Ranney

    Haha, so I WAS using the right path from Davison to Shipping & Receiving! This application is delightful. It looks like, for the most part, it delivers the paths I believe to be shortest, based on extensive on-the-ground testing. It’s surprising, to me, to see the relative sizes of certain parts of campus from above. I guess uphill and downhill travel time might be the reason I think of some stretches as being longer than they look.

    If you continue to improve this program, you might add two key details: the difference between individual buildings in senior housing and the shortcuts across fields. (I know you said that you want the program to be relevant in winter, but … does snow really stop people from crossing fields? Maybe it stops the Californian students.) Including the path through the Shakespeare garden is a good approximation for the “sketchy path” behind Sanders, but what if someone wants to know which of those two routes is faster? I’ve also always wanted to check which boardwalks through the marsh were advantageous.

    Given the data you have behind the curtain, could one get the program to return a distance in feet for each path? What about the change in elevation?

  • http://blog.carolynworks.com Carolyn

    Hey, sometimes it’s just so snowy that crossing takes longer than it would to go around. It’s also not so great for someone in a crutches or wheelchair situation. (I choose some paths based on what I thought my grandma could cross. She can only go up a couple steps at a time.) Some of the “sketchy” paths are very hard to estimate because I cannot see them at all on the satellite image.

    Adding the distance in feet should be an imminent update. I also want to make each senior house a start/end point, too. Elevation … might be tricker, but I’ll look into it. I’m not sure whether the google maps api has that data in the same way it has lat/long coordinates.

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