Brisbane Pulse: a live map of where the city is buzzing right now

Ask any Brisbane bin chicken how it always ends up exactly where the chips are, and it won’t tell you — trade secret. Barry, our resident ibis, just follows the crowd: more people, more dropped hot chips, simple. We built the same instinct into the map. It’s called Brisbane Pulse, and it shows you where the city is actually buzzing right now — no bin-diving required.

What Brisbane Pulse is

Pulse is a live layer on the city map. Turn it on and the map dims to night, then lights up with glowing dots wherever there’s something going on — a market, a gig, a museum late, a festival. The hotter the spot, the brighter and redder the dot: 🔥 buzzing, 🟠 getting busy, 🟡 some activity, ⚪ quiet. One glance and you can see which corners of Brisbane are awake tonight.

Tap a hotspot, see what’s on

A glowing dot is only half the story — the useful bit is what’s behind it. Tap any hotspot and a card opens with the real events in that pocket of the city: name, time and venue, each one linkable to its own page. When a spot has a lot on, the card even lets you search within it and group events by time, type or place, so “60 things on this weekend in the CBD” becomes something you can actually skim. From there it’s one tap through to that suburb’s full events listing.

Now, Tonight or the Weekend

A switch at the bottom flips Pulse between three horizons:

• Now — what’s live around this moment, decaying as the day moves on.
• Tonight — the evening ahead, for the “where do we go?” decision.
• Weekend — the whole two days at a glance, for planning ahead.

Every hotspot is a real place on the isometric map, so you’re never looking at an abstract heatmap — you’re looking at the actual buildings and streets, glowing.

What it is — and isn’t

We’re careful with the wording on the card for a reason: Pulse shows estimated activity, not a crowd count. It’s built from what’s publicly on — events from Brisbane’s open listings — plus a light signal from public social and video posts that mention a place (we count that something was said nearby; we never store or show the post, the text or who wrote it). So a bright dot means “there’s a lot happening here,” not “there are exactly 400 people standing on this footpath.” No tracking, no accounts required, nothing following you around — just the city’s own public pulse, read honestly.

How to turn it on

Open the map with Pulse switched on, or tap the 🔥 Pulse button in the top bar any time. It’s free, there’s no app to install, and it works signed out. Share a hotspot and the link reopens on that exact spot, so “meet you where it’s poppin’” is now a real sentence you can send.