The 5 Best 3D Subway Maps

Shinjuku Station has a well-earned reputation as one of the world's largest and most bewildering transport hubs. The  Shinjuku Station Indoor interactive 3D map tackles that complexity by turning the station's official indoor mapping data into a clean, schematic three-dimensional blueprint. This map strips everything back to the essential geometry of corridors, platforms and rooms, making it much easier to understand how the station's many levels fit together.

Navigation is simple and intuitive. Users can pan across the station, zoom in and out, and hold Ctrl while dragging the mouse to rotate the view, making it easy to examine the station from almost any angle. Individual floors can be toggled on and off using the built-in control panel, allowing users to isolate a single level or view multiple floors stacked vertically. 

The map also includes an animated pedestrian network overlay, revealing the underlying connections between different parts of the station and illustrating how people move through the complex. Select the pedestrian network from the map menu and the map adds animated directional flow lines that indicate movement through the station. These animated links connect multiple floors, creating a dynamic visualisation of Shinjuku's internal pedestrian network instead of simply displaying static corridors.

Under the hood, the project is built with Three.js, the popular JavaScript 3D graphics library that brings WebGL-powered visualisations to the browser. The station geometry is generated directly from GeoJSON datasets, with polygons extruded into simple 3D forms that resemble an architectural blueprint rather than a conventional map. Separate datasets are loaded for floors, spaces and fixtures before being assembled into individual floor groups that users can switch on and off independently.

Also See

X-Ray Area Maps - New York architect Candy Chan's 3D plans of New York subway stations

Ian Visits - Transport for London's axonometric diagrams for 120 London Underground stations

Stations and Transfers - Detailed 3D axonometric diagrams for subway stations across the world

Station Viewer - 3D WebGL models of a number of London Underground and DLR stations