Foursquare has uploaded new videos to its Vimeo account that illustrate the “pulse” of major cities, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and Istanbul, by plotting a year of check-ins over a 24-hour period.

Check-ins are represented by dots, and each is colored according to the category of the place. For example, orange dots are stores, green dots are restaurants, and blue dots are nightclubs.

In the resulting animations, the cities appear like living things, inhaling and exhaling commuters and cooling from a orange-green to blue as their denizens gravitate to nightclubs. It’s a strangely mesmerizing effect.

Foursquare released a similar video for New York when Hurricane Sandy hit.