Maps of the Week

This week saw the release of two very impressive WebGL globes. The Quake Map visualizes over 10,000 earthquakes from 1900 to July 2015, while LuciadRIA 3D's Air Traffic Analysis animates over 24 hours worth of global air-traffic.

Both maps use WebGL 3d globes to visualize large amounts of worldwide data. Both maps also include the option to view and filter the mapped data by location and by time.


Another map which includes both a temporal and spatial element is Mapping 24 Hours of Car Sharing. This map animates through one day's worth of car journeys made with Berlin's DriveNow car-sharing vehicles.

The routes for each journey are estimated based on the optimal routes between the origin and destination. If you turn on the 'heatmap' layer you can also view Berlin's streets changing color as the day progresses, the streets with the most car-sharing traffic becoming redder and redder on the map as the day progresses.


Raúl Moya Do's Street View paintings have for a long time been one of my favorite uses of the Custom Street View option in the Google Maps API. He has now taken this technology to a whole new level with the option to view his paintings with Google Cardboard.

Mobile Cyclorama is an amazing project which allows you to view Raúl Moya Do's paintings using Google Maps Street View technology. Open up one of the paintings using the Street View option and you can step inside the painting and view it as a 360 degree panorama. View it in Google Cardboard and you enter a whole new painted virtual reality.