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.
With ClimateWizard you can:
view historic temperature and rainfall maps for anywhere in the world
view state-of-the-art future predictions of temperature and rainfall around the world
view and download climate change maps in a few easy steps
ClimateWizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth. The first generation of this web-based program allows the user to choose a state or country and both assess how climate has changed over time and to project what future changes are predicted to occur in a given area. ClimateWizard represents the first time ever the full range of climate history and impacts for a landscape have been brought together in a user-friendly format.
The results are impressive, although every model I tried showed us all digging out the shorts by 2080.
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.
The maps above show 1,000, 500 and 200 foot buffers around residential uses Downtown. They are not an exact visualization of where dispensaries could be located — they don’t include buffers around substance abuse center and may not include all residential hotels — but they’re more than the City Council has to work with.
The City’s planning department is working on creating maps of the ordinance’s effects, but they won’t be ready until January.
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.
This transaction map was created as a study of the extensive activity that occurs in the eBay Marketplace on the biggest offline shopping day of the year. It is a visualization of all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions on eBay on Black Friday, November 27, 2009 (12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM EST). Although eBay is an international marketplace, this map is focused on U.S. data, as Black Friday is the traditional beginning of the holiday shopping season for the U.S.
Hit their site for the interactive map where you can zoom into your region of interest, and see the transactions over time.
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. they’ve developed a web-portal called “Intelligence on Demand” that offers a pay-as-you-go web-access to over 100 million high-resolution images.
Dozens of U.S. government agencies rely on sophisticated mapping and imagery to support their operations. But for many of the organizations within these agencies, it’s not practical to purchase and maintain a multi-million dollar server infrastructure to house terabytes of high-resolution imagery.
For organizations looking for affordable, instant access to imagery, Lockheed Martin offers Intelligence on Demand, a new web portal developed in collaboration with Pictometry International, Corp. that delivers a complete library of imagery and analytical tools for a flat monthly subscription fee.
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.
This being a blog about maps, I of course mean Harvard not as a school but as a geographic entity. What color is the landscape, physical and cultural? When people look around at whatever interests them, what colors are they looking at?
Independently mapping the intensity and hue of the various colors, and connecting it with the geo-tagging data for the images, creates some pretty interesting maps. Still a work-in-progress, but I look forward to seeing where it leads.
WebDesigner Depot has compiled a list of 30 great infographic maps covering everything from interactive sites to posters, beer to Starbucks.
Map illustrations are a dime a dozen however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.
As designers, we’re constantly searching for ways to improve and style our designs, this is exactly what the following 30 infographics and sites display below; the breaking of rules.
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.
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. they’ve developed a web-portal called “Intelligence on Demand” that offers a pay-as-you-go web-access to over 100 million high-resolution images.
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.
WebDesigner Depot has compiled a list of 30 great infographic maps covering everything from interactive sites to posters, beer to Starbucks.
VizWorld.com 
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