An interesting piece – Medusa, 2001, by William Kentridge – that we recently saw here at MassArt, reminding me of map projections and how distorted and often misunderstood the pictures are that we are drawing of our planet.
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Tag Archive for 'Map'
New Year’s resolution: harvest some knowledge from those colleagues who are digging through R. Apparently it’s not only an excellent tool for number crunching, but also can be used for neat geographic data visualizations.
Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R
Ever wanted to know what your local subway map would look like?
The designers at Transit Authority Figures might provide an answer. They did some great work in designing subway maps for small towns without public transportation. One interesting map detail is actually the wording: the station names are well chosen, with good local knowledge, not one of those “funny” naming schemas, and it almost makes you believe you’re viewing a real one.
The tricky part of pedestrian navigation is, that it actually involves a lot of refinement work on current base maps in order to provide a good service. Using regular digital road maps, as we know them in Google Maps for instance, is just not possible. Pedestrians need different information. Most maps currently used in navigation devices are made by and for people in cars, moving at 35km/h and faster. As pedestrian you move slower, on other paths and parts of the street, your orientation senses work differently, you notice other landmarks, signs, use short-cuts, cross streets randomly and can make u-turns whenever you want to.
Nokia Maps 3.0 has some enhancements aimed to help pedestrians. I especially found the 3D-like landmark drawings on the map and the continuous reverse geocoding very helpful. I think I already mentioned in an earlier post the very well done cartography, optimized for smaller displays.
Walking directions work in most cases well. Nokia Maps knows the park next to the subway station I often use and shows me the shortest path to it.
Seems an easy task, but Google Maps, based on TeleAtlas’ road network in that area, shows some fantasy foot paths inside the park and suggests another route circling around.
OpenStreetMap shows the real layout of all foot paths in the park and provides good walking directions (by OpenRouteService) too.
The quality of the returned walking directions depend on the strength of the GPS signal in some cases. If it’s weak, Nokia Maps doesn’t dare to send you out to take a walk on a three lane street full with speeding cars.
Imagine you step out the subway station and ask Nokia Maps for the shortest way walking to your destination. If you’re lucky and the signal is good, Nokia Maps snaps you to the right street and returns good results.
Let’s assume it’s a bad GPS day and your signal is about 10m off, happens quite frequently in urban areas. Nokia snaps you on a 3 car-lane street and suggest you start walking there. Not good.
That’s what the situation looks like on the aerial. The subway station was under construction then, but there is an exit next to the containers. Anyways, a pedestrian navigation service should never propose walking on that road.
Other services I tried in that area had some problems too. Google Maps sent you on the same road. OpenRouteService basically returned a good walking route, but didn’t know that you had to jump off a 3m wall to reach the nice foot path along the canal.
Second Light is a new development of MS research on Microsoft’s multi-touch device Surface. It basically allows to display additional information in some kind of hidden light layer above the Surface screen. That way, extra map layers, like labels, can be shown on top of a base map without covering geographic objects for instance. It seems to be an interesting option for visualizing and exploring geographic content – makes me wonder when we see Virtual Earth demoing on Surface.
The video below gives a quick demo of how Second Light works.
[via rolf generated content]
Update:
The All Points Blog covers Second Light too, along with other new GeoGoodies from Microsoft.
I think the UNEP map below illustrates very well the reasons for some difficulties in finding a solution for the conflict in the Caucasus region:
Too many and too big interests, mainly dealing with oil and gas infrastructure, collide in a too small area. [via La Cartoteca]
… (a computational information design researcher) is playing around with geographic information and creates some really interesting things.
First, a totally low budget weather map by simply analyzing and mapping people’s chats about weather on twitter:
and second, some nice map visualizations, all done with processing:
A fascinating concept: because unhappy with conventional map presentations where every map feature has another distance to the map viewer, the architect Lindsay Churchill turned a globe inside out and put the viewer into the center. The result is the Mapparium, a three-story glass globe, at The Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. A must-visit especially for people who like maps and cartography.
The glass surface produces interesting acoustics inside. You can speak to your friend standing at the other end of the room by whispering to the wall, or standing in the center of the globe you’ll hear yourself talking in surround sound. A recommended visit for sound artists and engineers too I’d guess.
The map itself is a historical snapshot of what the world looked like in the nineteen-thirties – Russia is the Soviet Union, Colonies in Africa and Yugoslavia as one country. It’s interesting to see how the political world has changed. Especially at that scale.
More than any marketing leaflet, the Google/ESRI Where 2008 presentation made me curious about the potential of the upcoming ArcGIS Server release.
I find the example shown of the fires in California, where students started locating and pinpointing new fire outbreaks in Google My Maps, very interesting. In the field of spatial planning, stakeholder participation is often a crucial part. Since most projects deal with spatial impacts, using maps and plans is just natural to transport information. Enabling feedback processes directly via easy-to-use map interfaces like Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth could support communication strategies very well I think.
The thing is, our clients, partners and most stakeholders aren’t GIS power users. They are not very familiar with desktop GIS and, for obvious reasons, use map server interfaces only when they are forced to (the “Captive” user base). Anything what helps increasing user experience on interactive maps is just a huge step forward.
Arc2Earth is handy for quick & easy interactive map publishing via Google Maps/Virtual Earth or KML, but the potential of having feedback collected, (geo)processed and instantly returned by a server leaves room for some really great project ideas and use cases.
I guess first I’ll have a look at the GeoServer project and see what I can accomplish with the Open Geo-Stack, before bothering our local ESRI sales people.