Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Maps of the Week


The most beautiful maps of the past week come from this collection of road orientation maps. Crayon the Grids is a series of maps where all the streets have been colored based on their orientation. The results, I think you will agree are absolutely stunning.

This series of city road orientation visualizations includes maps of San Francisco, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, London, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin and Boston.


Flickr and Panoramaio data has been used in the past to create some truly beautiful heat maps visualizing the areas where people have taken the most photographs. It is always amazing to zoom in on these visualizations to see how maps of towns and cities can emerge simply from geo-tagged photo data.

There is now a new application which helps you build a map of a location yourself simply by using the tags in geo-tagged Flickr photos.  Mapr from Pimpampum.net allows you to dynamically load Flickr photo data by geographical tags. You can therefore create your own map of a location simply by loading more and more geolocated Flickr data (using the photos' tags).


If you enter your zip code into the Commute Map you can view a mapped visualization of where people in your area commute to for work. You can also use the map to compare the length and time of your daily journey to work with the average commuter journeys of your neighbors.

The red circles on the map show the center of each zip code area. If you click on the red circles you can view the percentage of people who commute from your entered zip code area to the zip code area represented by the circular marker. You can also view details about how far the commute journey is, how long it is likely to take and how that compares to the average commute journey length and time from your zip code area.


Recently a number of developers have been adding sound to Google Maps Street View. The combination of 360 degree panoramas with recorded sound enables developers to help recreate both the audio and visual experience of locations around the world.

The Sound City Project has taken this concept one step further by producing their own interactive panoramas and combining these with high quality 3D sound recordings. Using the application you can explore locations, such as Times Square in New York and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, with custom Street View imagery while listening to the sounds recorded at the same locations.

A styled Google Map allows you to navigate between the different locations featured in the project, including a number of locations in New York, San Francisco and also in Sweden & Norway.

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