Saturday, June 29, 2013

OpenStreetMap in 3d


The F4 map is an amazing 3d map built upon OpenStreetMap. The map includes some incredible 3d buildings, 3d trees and even the water is animated. The shadows on the map are in real-time and reflect the position of the sun and therefore move throughout the day. I've also been told that the map displays real-time weather - so if it it is currently raining at a location you should see it raining on the map.

There is no 'about' page on this map so I have no idea who developed this (there is a fairly empty Wiki page that includes an empty 'about' page). Hopefully at some point in the near future we might learn a little more about the development of this map.

My one user tip is to use the ctrl key with the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to change the angle of the map. Update: microformats.dk has sent me a few interesting locations on the F4 Map:


GitHub Africa is an impressive visualisation of GitHub users in Africa. The map was created using MapBox. It is worth zooming in on the map to find out how many active GitHub users there are in individual cities in Africa.

The map is an initiative of the CodeAfrica project which seeks to grow, promote and highlight coders in Africa.


Over the last couple of months there has been an amazing number of mapped visualisations of the world's flight paths. Contrailz is a visualisation of tracking data from Planefinder.net during the whole month of October in 2012.

The map displays about 1 billion location 'dots'. The result reveals some amazing traffic patterns, especially around the world's larger airports. For example, the stacking patterns around Heathrow in London (above) are clearly visible on the map.

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