Thursday, January 28, 2021

Trippy Rorschach Maps

Take a look at the following map and tell me what you see. If you see a bat or a butterfly then we may need to discuss your childhood in a little more detail.

Landschach is an interactive map which creates a Rorschach test pattern from elevation data in Mapbox's map tiles. The map was created by Mapbox's Damon Burgett. Essentially Landschach places four different maps on one page. Each of the maps is rotated 90 degrees to the previous map to create a kaleidoscope type effect. The result is that the map creates patterns very similar to the ink blot patterns used by psychologists in Rorschach tests. 

The colorful map patterns used in Landschach were created in Mapbox Studio. Essentially the vector-terrain contour data was stylized in Mapbox Studio by applying a sin wave to the elevation values.



This isn't the first time that Damon has created a Rorshach map. His Rorschach Satellite map creates a similar kaleidoscope effect using Mapbox aerial views. If you like a pattern created with either Rorschach Satellite or the Landschach map then you can copy and paste the map URL to share a link to your view.

We haven't finished yet! You might also like #rorschcam, which applies the same kaleidoscope effect to New York webcams from the New York City Department of Transportation.  This one doesn't have a map but the webcam images are live, so now we have a moving real-time kaleidoscope view of New York's streets. 

Who would have thought that New York's streets could have got any weirder?

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