Data Story
OZMesh lets you see all the mesh blocks in the whole country (but in this version, we didn't exactly do any optimization in the rendering so we had to limit it to sydney only), and visualize mesh block data such as urban heat, vegetation and population.
It can also visualize SA1/SA2 data. As can be seen from the screenshots (and video), you can make red/green/blue and height of the blocks, and now suddenly you can compare/contrast multiple attributes to see if there are any interesting knowledge to be gained from it.
For example, we saw that there's a pocket of urban heat in high density urban population, and there's really not that many trees around that area, as opposed to other cooler places.
We also saw that the young children (aged 0-4) years old basically only exists in suburbs with new housing developments, such as the Olympic park. As you go higher in age, you start to find people living closer to the city. Not shown in the video, but you also find older and older people towards the rural areas.
This is just in a few minutes of messing around with the tool, which took a really long time to build. Imagine what can be done when full, processed datasets are integrated into this map. You can play with data much faster with this tool than with online based tools.
We actually had to reduce the mesh map polygon size considerably, in order to render all the mesh blocks on screen at once. This was actually the hardest part and took the longest time, but fortunately we managed to get it done.