John Nelson, a GIS specialist at Esri, has given us this extremely cool video about simplifying and quantifying an over-abundance of data into a beautiful and easy to understand visualization.
The key factor to this visualization is tessellation, where a pattern is made up of repeated shapes with no gaps, such as honeycomb. Nelson uses this hexagonal design to organize the geographic space of overlapping flight data in the Mid-West, clearly representing how many flights occurred over which areas in both 2D and 3D maps.
You can also read his accompanying blog detailing the process at Esri’s ArcGIS Blog.