Maps of the Week

It is a disgrace that nine years after the release of Google Maps, Google still haven't managed to properly map one of America's most loved towns. Luckily where ever Google fails Esri comes to the rescue.

Look up Springfield on Playgis and you will find a gloriously detailed map of this most famous of American towns. From the world's first ever Kwik-E-Mart to Springfield Elementary School, this Spingfield map has it all. You can even use the map to look up the address of individual families, for example the Simpsons family at 742 Evergreen Terrace.


Although Google Maps doesn't yet cover Springfield it does have Street View. Thanks to Amplifon we also now have a neat library to add sound to Street View panoramas.

Last month Amplifon created Sounds of Street View, a new platform which allows you to add sound to Google Maps Street View. If you visit Sounds of Street View Create Your Own you can download the Sounds of Street View framework and read a detailed guide explaining how to create your own Street View with sound experience.

Zombie Sound Experienz uses the Business Photos Street View tour from the Zombie Manor in Drayton with the Amplifon library to create a creepy virtual tour, with full 3d sound. The custom Street View tour was created for Drayton Manor by 360 Agency, who also created the Street View tour of Diagon Alley for the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

As you progress through this zombie filled virtual Street View tour you can now actually hear the zombies pursuing you.

As you visit the different rooms in the Zombie Manor you will hear a variety of creepy sounds. Different zombies and rooms have different sounds attached to them, which get louder or quieter as you approach or travel away from them.

As well as a Simpsons' map and a creepy Zombie Street View tour we also saw some great serious maps this week. I  particularly liked the Urban Institute's map showing where minorities in the USA are being priced out of the housing market.

A New View of the Housing Boom and Bust plots 100 million mortgages from 2000 to 2012 across the United States. The map shows each owner-occupied mortgage origination for twelve years, in which the borrower’s race and ethnicity were fully recorded.  Zoom in on just about any city on this map and you can see a clear pattern of African American and Hispanic households being disproportionately affected by constrained mortgage lending.

Another map which caught my eye this week was Infoamazonia's  Visaguas, which examines the availability of clean drinking water & sewage in Amazon municipalities and the incident rates of a number of diseases caused by poor water & sewage infrastructure. 

If you use the tabs, above the map, you can select to view Water Supply, Diseases or Access to Sewage on the map. When you select either of the three main categories you can then select from a number of subcategories. For example, if you select diseases you can view the incident rates, per municipality, for a number of different diseases, including Cholera, Dengue Fever and Typhoid.