Wired’s Geekdad has a collection of 20 fun and geeky images captured by satellite and visible in everyone’s favorite map viewer Google Maps. Ranging from air force bases and the GooglePlex itself to crop designs and herds of animals, it’s a great collection.
Space is full of images that make a geek’s heart flutter. But how about when we point those cameras back down at us on Earth?
Google Earth has created a treasure trove of geeky images. Here are some of my favorites
Hit his site for pictures and links directly to the map locations.
At the recent TED2010 event, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating Microsoft’s Bing Maps research in front of the live audience. Starting with the already available aerial view, isometric view, street view and others, he then moves on to showing features in development. This starts with Flickr geo-tagged photo integration, and then moves into their “backpack camera” that enables street-view level imagery in internal spaces. Then he moves onto the most impressive new feature: Live geotagged streaming video from a location, as some of his fellow employees stream video of themselves playing at a local fish market into his browser. An interesting example of a kind of reverse-augmented reality, augmenting a computer display with live video, but very powerful.
The New York TImes has created an interactive 3-D map of the Olympic venues that will be occurring soon in Vancouver, Canada. Like any 3-D application, you can rotate, pan, and zoom into the map. Clicking on one of the four sites will cause you to load up a more detailed map of the venue. You have four sites to choose from, including Whistler Olympic Park, Whistler Mountain, Cypress Mountain, and Vancouver. Once you navigate into one of these four sites, you are able to see the actual places where the events are occurring. For example, you can see the Richmond Olypic Oval building where the speed skating will be held on the second day of the competition.
The Natural Science Museum of Barcelona hosts a database of over 150 years worth of biological records from around the world, and now presents the data via an interactive map on their website.
The database consists of about 50.000 different records of mollusc, vertebrata and artropodes. All the information is structured following the Darwin Core Standard, developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
On the map you can zoom into any area in the world and click on an active square to view all of the registers located there.
Matthew Bloch, a graphics editor for the New York Times, has a great website where he has cataloged several of the interactive maps that have appeared in print and on the site over the years. Some we have covered before but there are dozens I’ve not seen.
Also, he has a fun area called “Accidental Maps” showing the various errors along the way to a completed product. Shown above is his broken “Map of congressional votes”.
The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi have collaborated to create an online interactive “Climate Wizard”. You can review the last 50 years of data, or look at predictions out to 2050 and 2080 using one of about 30 different circulation models and emission scenarios. (…)
Los Angeles is currently debating the location of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, attempting to strike a balance between access and control, and one requirement up for debate is that they should be 1000 feet away from residential uses. But what does that look like? BlogDownTown whipped up a quick map to find out. (…)
Black Friday is over (thank goodness) and now it’s time for the next part of this popular financial holiday: Analyzing the data. Ebay gets credit for being first with their new website featuring a map of all transactions performed through the eBay Marketplace on Black Friday. (…)
Lockheed Martin has just announced a new service aimed at delivering sophisticated mapping and imagery tools to U.S. Government agencies. Collaborating with Pictometry International, Corp. (…)
Andy Woodruff has developed an interesting algorithm that processes images on Flickr for a specific geographical area and builds a colormap, similar to a heatmap, of the various colors found in that area. (…)
If you thought Starbucks was everywhere, then you need to take a look at a great graphic at WeatherSealed where he charts the distance to the nearest McDonalds from every location in the US. (…)
A website serving up a browsable map of Hong Kong, similar to Google Maps, shows a beautiful isometric view with buildings, foliage, and labeled streets. It only has 4 levels of detail but it really sets a new standard for what web-maps should be. (…)
As part of the VizWeek Discovery Exhibition, Microsoft Research has published a detailed document of the result of their “Heatmap” project which monitors and visualizes access to the Microsoft Virtual Earth system.
Back to the Wall Street Journal again today with a great interactive map of the Tour de France route. The map on the route shows each of the segments, while data on the left shows elevation maps along the route and which day that portion of the route takes place. They have pictures along the route, and the whole thing is a great interactive piece. (…)
A few visualization tool that merges US Census data with Google Maps to find concentrations of stereotypical archetypes such as cougars, sugar daddies, and yuppies.
Wired’s Geekdad has a collection of 20 fun and geeky images captured by satellite and visible in everyone’s favorite map viewer Google Maps. Ranging from air force bases and the GooglePlex itself to crop designs and herds of animals, it’s a great collection.
At the recent TED2010 event, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating Microsoft’s Bing Maps research in front of the live audience. Starting with the already available aerial view, isometric view, street view and others, he then moves on to showing features in development. This starts with Flickr geo-tagged photo integration, and then moves into their “backpack camera” that enables street-view level imagery in internal spaces. Then he moves onto the most impressive new feature: Live geotagged streaming video from a location, as some of his fellow employees stream video of themselves playing at a local fish market into his browser. An interesting example of a kind of reverse-augmented reality, augmenting a computer display with live video, but very powerful.
Matthew Bloch, a graphics editor for the New York Times, has a great website where he has cataloged several of the interactive maps that have appeared in print and on the site over the years. Some we have covered before but there are dozens I’ve not seen.
VizWorld.com 
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