The project is called New York Talk Exchange (NYTE), and it shows the telecommunications traffic coming into and leaving New York City at any point during the day. That traffic data, which is a combination of Internet protocol (IP) and voice communications, is represented on three large visualizations that hang in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition, "Design and the Elastic Mind," and can also be seen on the Senseable website.

At its core, the project "reveals how New York connects with the network of global cities," says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City laboratory and associate professor of urban technologies at MIT. (Ratti is also responsible for the Real-Time Rome exhibition, which was able to "paint" a digital picture of Rome traffic on glass screens using traffic congestion, the routes of the city's taxis and buses, and where city dwellers congregate and move—all with real-time wireless data.)

But in looking closer at New York City's data flows, which come from AT&T's networks, Ratti and his team discovered the complex and varied connections people in New York make with the rest of the world as well as the "global rhythm of communications."

An image representing the volume of Internet data flowing between New York City and the world. From MIT senseable city lab.

"The pulse of the planet, with its different time zones," he says, "is also the pulse of New York."

The first visualization is called Globe Encounters, and it uses 3-D real-time animations and glowing virtual lines to illustrate New York City's connections to other cities—a sort of "globalization in real time," according to the team. The greater the glow, the greater the amount of IP traffic.

The second, called Pulse of the Planet, shows how those connections change over the course of the day as "time zones sweep across the planet," according to the project overview. "It also shows how New York follows a 24-hour schedule, as if it were always awake to connect to the rest of the globe."

The last visualization (The World Inside New York) examines the city's five boroughs, demonstrating how global connections can vary by neighborhood. The team refers to this as "globalization from the bottom." For example, Mumbai, India, ranks 24th as the origin of calls into Manhattan, and 11th in calls into Queens, according to the MIT team. Toronto, Canada, is one of the main destinations for calls out of Manhattan, but accounts for just 1 percent of calls from the Bronx.