Community features AgentMaps If you’ve ever played Sim City then you’ll be familiar with agent-based simulation in a spatial context, from the individual people all the way down to the energy and water as it flows through the network. AgentMaps is a JavaScript library for
Community features Netherlands building ages Using an open dataset of building and address data, this interactive 3D map visualises the age of buildings across the Netherlands. The age needs to be taken with a pinch of salt — as it’s been proven to be inconsistent in places — however it
Community features The White House using LIDAR data This visualisation from Scott Reinhard is another great example of LIDAR data being passed through Blender to create a 3D effect using realistic lighting and shadows. There are no 3D building models being used here — the result is created by artificially extruding GeoTIFF elevation
Community features Landfall — hand-made, physical 3D nautical maps I stumbled across Landfall a few months ago and have been fascinated by their work ever since. Their speciality is physical 3D topographical reliefs that are painstakingly crafted by hand from nautical charts and Ordnance Survey maps. You can commission them to create a
Community features Elastic maps Do you know what would make maps better? If they jiggled and wobbled as you move them around! This is exactly what these elastic maps do, giving elevated areas more elasticity than the lower areas as you move the map around. The result is
Community features RUS Training The Research and User Support for Sentinel Core Products (RUS Training) is a place to learn all about how to use Sentinel satellite data. It’s free and there are a selection of upcoming courses to choose from. Previous courses and webinars have been
Community features 50 Must-follow Twitter accounts for spatial data science Lists like this are usually hit or miss, but this one by CARTO is spot on with the people you should be following within the spatial community. They’ve provided a little description about each person which is a nice touch. 50 Must-Follow Twitter
Community features Echoes in space If you’d like to learn about remote sensing using radar then you should check out the Echoes in Space course. It’s online and you can join the course even after its started, so you can learn at your own pace. Echoes in
Community features Open Datasets — Scale And last but not least, Scale have collated a whole range of datasets around autonomous vehicles, from sensor data to maps and annotated videos. The data comes from various places and is well worth checking out if you’re interested in this space. Open
Community features Lyft autonomous driving dataset Following in the theme of autonomous vehicle data, Lyft recently released their own dataset captured from their fleet of vehicles. Containing raw camera and LIDAR sensor data, they also hope that the data can be used by others to improve the algorithms and other
Community features Argoverse The various datasets and maps released by Argoverse contain a wealth of information captured by their fleet of autonomous vehicles. Their aim is for the data to be used to help others to test, experiment and teach self-driving vehicles. HomeTwo public datasets supported by
Community features How to render a map of San Diego's smart city streetlights with HERE XYZ, Python and Tangram HERE have released a tutorial on processing and mapping the street light sensors from the City of San Diego. They use Python for processing the data, HERE XYZ for hosting and filtering the data, and Tangram for outputting it in a Web browser using
Community features Visualising animated radar data with vector tiles Normally when you hear of vector tiles you think of static data — buildings, roads, etc. One area which isn’t well documented with vector tiles is how to use them with temporal data, especially if it needs to be animated. This approach by Mapbox
Community features Mapping the land between the tides “Thanks to the Moon, the Sun, and gravity, the place where the land meets the sea is not a fixed line.” — a simple concept to understand, yet one which is often overlooked when reading a map. This article on the NASA Earth Observatory blog
Community features The painted panoramas that will make you yearn for Yosemite and dream of Denali This article by Atlas Obscura takes a look at Heinrich Berann’s stunning painted maps of America’s national parks. Throughout the article Tom Patterson details some of the process behind both the creation of these maps and how Heinrich came to work for
Community features Google Earth Studio You may have already heard of Google Earth Studio — a Web-based animation tool for Google Earth’s satellite and 3D imagery. It’s certainly not new but it’s still well worth a feature. I’m seeing it used more and more, especially for
Community features mapdeck: R interface to Deck.gl and Mapbox If you use R then you’ll be interested in mapdeck, a library for visualising spatial data in R using Mapbox GL JS and Deck.gl. There are a large number of visualisation options and layer outputs to choose from. SymbolixAU/mapdeckR interface to
Community features RivWidthCloud RivWidthCloud is a useful tool for Google Earth Engine to calculate river widths. It can calculate the widths over time from a series of Landsat images and can be run as either JavaScript or Python. Introducing RivWidthCloud, a Google Earth Engine tool for calculating
Community features Foggy Spaces Ever found it hard to place where you live on a map? I know I have. This concept by Dylan Moriarty is a beautiful way of thinking about maps and how they compare to our mental representation of the places that we’re familiar
Community features Britain’s most complex motorway junctions Lucie Woellenstein has created a visualisation of the most complex motorway junctions in Britain, beautiful in it’s simplicity. The complexity was defined by creating a buffer around each junction and working out the number of road nodes, road intersections, and the number of
Community features The Geology of Mars Spatial Awareness, also known as the Eleanor Lutz Fan Club! This time I’m featuring her fascinating map on the geology of Mars. Based on an original map by the USGS, Eleanor has given it her own twist and also translated the key into
Community features John Snow's cholera map in 3D John Snow’s cholera map needs no introduction. This 2019 version by Janett Baresel, Cheryl Lau and Raluca Nicola takes his map into the third dimension. It’s not just for the sake of it though, the 3D aspect allows for the “stacks of
Community features EthicalGEO EthicalGEO is an initiative aimed to engage people within the spatial industry and get them thinking about the ethical challenges posed by spatial technology and the way that it’s being used to shape society. Homepage | EthicalGEOThe American Geographical Society (AGS) EthicalGEO Initiative seeks
Community features Paul Naylor I featured one of Paul’s maps in a previous issue — the Ordnance Survey map of the Apollo 11 moon landing. A lovely piece of work that even Buzz Aldrin was seen enjoying this past week! He’s also active on Twitter, sharing work
Community features The Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database Obscure datasets are usually the most interesting, just like this dataset that tracks the positions of icebergs since 1992. No doubt there are all sorts of interesting visualisations and insight that can be produced from this data. The Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database