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Amazing 3D rendering with Aerialod

Alasdair Rae has put together a guide on how to use the amazing Aerialod tool (covered in a previous issue) and his tips for getting the most out of it.

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How to make a beautiful map

Who doesn’t want to make a beautiful map? Aside from a catchy title, this tutorial by Boris Müller goes into detail on how he and Fabian Ehmel created a

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3D Streetmix visualisations

Streetmix is a really useful tool for quickly prototyping new layouts for streets. What if you removed vehicle traffic altogether? Or what if you put in a protected cycle path?

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Tron-like videos from SAR constellation

If you’re not familiar with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) then I’d highly recommend taking a look. It’s a fascinating area of remote sensing that’s being used in

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Blender visualisation with clouds

It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for spatial visualisations created in Blender, I’ve certainly featured them enough in this newsletter. This one by Sean Conway is

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Dutch railways annual report

This visualisation by Jan Willem Tulp is a perfect example of thinking outside the box. It’s such a clever way of looking at temporal spatial data and visualising it

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Aerial embroidery

I absolutely love anything spatial that has been created in ways you wouldn’t expect, and this aerial embroidery by Victoria Rose is no exception! The attention to detail is

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#mapsathome

#mapsathome is a great hashtag on Twitter that’s packed full of people sharing random maps and map-related objects that are within their home. I want them all! #mapsathome on Twitter

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How to map an island in the Pacific

One of my favourite map-makers David Garcia has started a newsletter about his unique experiences and stories behind why he creates maps. His first issue is already out for you to read at your leisure, it’s well worth it. How to Map an

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Videos from FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2019

All the videos from the FOSS4G Oceania event from last year are now online. There’s tonnes of them with presentations covering a diverse range of topics. Most are 20 minutes long so a nice length to watch without having to invest too much

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How to do Map Stuff

If it’s possible to find a silver lining with this pandemic, it would be the way the spatial community has come together to help each other out and share knowledge. So many physical events have been cancelled this year and it’s been

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OpenSkyNetwork data during the pandemic

Air travel has been affected particularly negatively by the current pandemic, with some airlines and airports effectively closing down entirely. What’s interesting is that ADS-B tracking data is being constantly collected, and as a result we’re now able to create some interesting

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UP42 — The open platform for Earth data and analytics

I’m a little late to the party on this one. UP42 was launched a while ago now, a new platform for accessing and processing Earth observation data. I have to admit that I’ve not used it myself yet, but it looks slick

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Behind the scenes of a Planet satellite launch

Ever wondered what happens after a satellite is launched? I know I have. This post by Planet delves into the process they go through from first contact with their satellites all the way through to capturing their first image and integration within their wider

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Mapzen project updates

Some news that put a smile on my face recently was seeing that the various Mapzen projects are still alive and kicking. They produced a large number of innovative projects in all areas of the spatial scene before Mapzen shut down; including tile-based routing,

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getlon.lat — Help! I need a geocoder

Have you ever looked at the terms of service or licence restrictions when choosing a spatial platform? Did you know that some platforms don’t let you use them if you use OpenStreetMap? It’s a minefield. This website by Steve Bennett does a

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Recent updates to Mapbox GL JS

The Mapbox team have continued to churn out release after release for Mapbox GL JS, with countless new features since the last issue of the newsletter. Major improvements include a new LOD-based tiling system (in preparation for relaxing tilt limits) as well as improved

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Radio Garden

While not strictly spatial, this fun website lets you explore obscure radio stations from around the world using a 3D map in your browser. It has been created by Jonathan Puckey and his team and it’s quite addictive — I’ve found plenty of

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Mapping the shadows of New York City

If you wander around any particularly large city, especially in winter, you’ll notice how little sunlight actually reaches the streets. In this visualisation (and accompanying story), The New York

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Cristina Poiata

It’s been a pleasure seeing the maps submitted by Cristina for the #30DayMapChallenge — they have a fantastic attention to detail and design. Each has been submitted through her agency z creative labs, which is also worth checking out. Cristina’s Twitter feed is

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OpenGeoHub Summer School 2019 videos released

One event that slipped under my radar this year is OpenGeoHub. It looks like it was a really interesting one and the talks have been uploaded to YouTube. Tomislav Hengl (OpenGeoHub Foundation)OpenGeoHub is a not-for-profit research foundation with headquarters in Wageningen, the Netherlands

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NACIS 2019 videos released

If you’re like me and weren’t able to attend NACIS this year then you’ll be glad to hear that the videos of the talks have been released and are available on YouTube. So many amazing talks on so many different topics

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Helsinki real-time public transport positioning

Public transport datasets are amazing, especially when they include the real-time position of each vehicle. Fortunately, a lot of cities and transport authorities are realising the value of this data and making it available through APIs. The linked dataset here is for real-time positioning

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Guide to GeoTIFF compression and optimization with GDAL

If you use GeoTIFF then you’ll be interested in this post from Koko Alberti. In it he takes a detailed look at the various approaches for compressing GeoTIFF and optimising it for lower file size and decent performance, including benchmarks on read/write

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Adjusting the range: How to scale data

An old one but a good one! This relatively short post on the NASA Earth Observatory blog tackles the topic of scaling data in spatial visualisation. Specifically, it looks at the differences between linear and logarithmic methods for stretching the intermediate values and how

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