Maps of the Week

Mapillary, the crowd-sourced alternative to Street View, has added the option to view a 3D point cloud model for every location in the world - where Mapillary imagery exists. The point cloud models are built from all the photos submitted to Mapillary around a selected location.

You can read more about the new 3D point cloud model option on the Mapillary blog. However, if you want to dive straight in, go to Mapillary, click on the map and open a photo. When you view a photo in Mapillary you can now select the 'Show point cloud' to view the 3D model. You can zoom in and out in the model using your mouse-wheel. Press shift and drag on the model to orbit around the 3D point cloud.


Windyty, the animated weather map, is now an animated 3D globe. Windyty shows current and forecast weather conditions across the world.

By default Windyty now displays its animated weather layers on a 3D globe. If you prefer the mapped version you can click on the gear icon and turn off the 3D mode in the settings. The settings menu also allows you to change the temperature from Centigrade to Fahrenheit and to change the background map layer.

The onscreen menu allows you to adjust the weather layer that is animated on the map. These options include wind, temperature, clouds, waves, snow and pressure.


Mapping Ten Years of Fatal Traffic Accidents is an interactive map showing every single fatal traffic accident in the United States from 2004 to 2013.

When zoomed out the map presents a heatmap view showing the locations where the most fatal traffic accidents have occurred. When you zoom in map markers appear showing the location of each individual fatal accident. This means that you can zoom on any city or town in the USA to view a detailed map of where accidents occurred locally.

When you zoom in on the map option controls also appear which allow you to filter the accidents shown by contributing factors (alcohol, speeding and driver distraction). The markers are also colored on the map to show who was killed in each accident (driver, passenger, pedestrian etc).