Foursquare Checks In On The Pulse Of The World's Cities

(Foursquare)

Pale blue lines stream around New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Istanbul and San Francisco, as yellow and aqua blue hotspots pulse throughout these urban expanses, mixing in with flashes of red, green, purple and orange.

What looks like an image straight from "The Matrix" or "Tron" is actually the compilation of a year’s worth of check-in data from the social media company Foursquare.

Monitoring ‘check ins’ in Istanbul, London, Chicago, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, the company plotted them onto a map, with the results being a series of astounding time-lapse videos that shows activity in the cities every hour of the day boiled down to just over a minute.

The light blues are when people are in transit, greens when eating, and yellows when at work and so on.

Resembling more a scene of the Aurora Borealis in Alaska than that of a person’s daily grind, the time-lapse videos show some of the world’s largest cities coming alive in the morning and sustaining their pulse until the wee hours of the next morning.

New York appears to live up to its reputation as the city that never sleeps, sustaining its nightlife and eating habits until later than the other urban spaces. San Francisco and Tokyo appeared to be more on the early-to-bed, early-to-rise side of the coin than New York, Chicago and London.