The Maps of the Week

This Bing WebGL Demo is very clever. The demo uses Bing Map tiles, elevation data and BabylonJS to create an animated 3d drive-through of any route.

Enter a starting point and a destination into the demo and you can view a drive-through of the calculated route in 3d. You can speed-up or slow-down the rate of the animation and you can drag the map around to change the direction of your view.

The demo includes a menu of a few pre-configured routes or you can enter your own locations to generate a route. If you want to view your own route then I suggest you enter somewhere with hilly terrain to get the full 3d effect of the elevation data.


In the 1830's John Tallis published 88 pamphlets entitled 'Tallis's London Street Views'. These guides included a local map and sketched street views of a number of London's main commercial roads. It was, if you will, the Google Maps of Georgian London.

The Museum of London owns a number of these pamphlets and has created an amazing 'Street View' type application that allows you to virtually walk down and around 35 of these 19th Century London Streets. In London Street Views 1840 you can view the Tallis illustrations for each street and compare them to the modern view today as seen in Google's own Street View application.

However you should probably ignore the Google Maps Street View and just open up the 19th Century Tallis Street Views in full-screen mode. You can then pretend to be Jane Austen and twirl 360 degrees around these London streets and take your evening constitutional up down the Georgian London streets.


M+, Hong Kong’s museum for visual culture, has released an interactive online exhibition celebrating Hong Kong’s neon signs. Neon Signs explores, maps and documents the city's wonderful neon signs.

The public can upload images of their own favorite neon signs from throughout Hong Kong and they will appear on the Neon Signs Google Map. The map itself uses the Styled Map feature and custom map markers to create a unique looking map. The markers use horizontal neon colored lines that stand-out on a black and grey themed map.

The black and grey map tiles also ensure that the colorful photos of the city's neon signs appear bright against the dark map background.