Maps Mania's Maps of the Week

 
My favorite map this week was Balls, Barrels and Boxes, an impressive demonstration of a physics engine running on a 3d Esri map. The demo map allows you to drop balls, barrels or boxes on any location in the world and see how the objects react to the natural terrain.

The map was created using the cannon.js physics engine with Esri JS 4.0. You can explore the code behind the map in more detail on this GitHub page. The demo is a lot of fun to play with. With the Google Earth API being deprecated, hopefully this demo will also inspire other developers to create animated 3d visualizations and games with Esri and cannon.js.

 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a new interactive museum map designed especially for young visitors. The MetKids Map allows children to discover some of the fun and interesting things that they can find when they visit the museum. It also includes lots of inspiring and creative activities for kids to do during and after their trip to the MET.

The hand-drawn map of the MET has been made interactive using the OpenLayers mapping platform. It contains a number of map markers. The yellow markers seem to indicate some of the main important locations in the museum. The red markers show the locations of some of the exhibits which you can see when you visit the museum.

If you select a marker on the map you can read more about the selected exhibit or room. These descriptions include photos, audio, video clips and suggestions of fun activities that children can do in response to the museum's exhibits.

 
If the weather never makes you happy then you need this perfect weather map from the Washington Post. The map allows you to enter your perfect temperature range (which BTW is 71-80°F) and then shows you the areas of the country with the most days within your range.

The Perfect Weather map allows you to set the coldest and hottest temperature that you are comfortable with. It then uses 30-year's worth of temperature averages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to produce a choropleth map showing which U.S. counties get the most number of days within that temperature range (you can mouse-over individual counties on the map to discover how many days a year are likely to fall within your comfort zone).

 Once you've discovered the perfect place to live all you then need to do is move house and get a new job.