The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
Director: Carter Emmart
Curator: Ben R. Oppenheimer
Producer: Michael Hoffman
Executive Producer: Ro Kinzler
Co-Executive Producer: Martin Brauen
Manager, Digital Universe Atlas: Brian Abbott
Monopoly City Street is a worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board. It will start on the 9th september and will be the biggest live game of monopoly in history. The goal to the classic Monopoly has not changed: Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.
With this version it will be possible to own any street in the world, build humble houses, crazy castles and scyscrapers to collect rent. Keep up to date for the launch of Monopoly City streets: http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com Sounds interesting. I’ll give it a try. Definitifely.
As many other Internet users I stumbled across WolframAlpha some days ago. Wolfram Alpha defines itself as computational knowledge engine. The concept for using knowledge alpha can be seen as combination between Google and Wikipedia, but it uses quite an different approach.
It is an Encyclopedia, which tries to combine different information sources and facts matematically to produce a piece of systematic knowledge. answers from Wolfram Alpha can be combined in an arbitrary way. I have tried some example how geographical facts and questions can be combine to produce more or less meaningful knowledge.
1. Geocoding:
To locate any country should be possible.
where is austria? (possible, interpretation as location, visualisation with maps)
Finding US States possible, but it is not possible to find smaller districts in other countries
You can find some more suggestions about places and geography on their examples site. The embedded video shows an talk from Stephan Wolfram talking about WolframAlpha.
Unfortunately it was not possible for me to generate thematic maps with wolfram alpha (for example: all countries population map). Wolframs computational knowledge engine was officially started this Monday and can be accessed via: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
OffMaps is an application for the iPhone or iPod touch which can be downloaded via the Apple AppStore. Online map services consume quite a bit of bandwidth and mobile internet services are often limited. Therefore many users are looking for offline solutions for map services. Map services are of particular interest if your are travelling abroad. And in this case roaming charges can be very expensive. Also the fast access to maps at remote destinations can be enhanced.
OffMaps used the community driven map service platform OpenStreetMaps. OffMaps allows you to access maps and location bookmarks and stores Openstreetmap snapshots directly on the device for any area and zoomlevel. It also has two modes:
an online and
an offline mode.
Whenever possible OffMaps will use the online mode, but this can be configured. In online mode you can pan and zoom normally through the world map. Map images that have not been cached will automatically be loaded and saved to the cache for later offline use. You can also search for locations around the world, add bookmarks and preload whole areas in a zoom range of your liking. Of course you can view your own location too.
In offline mode you can only view maps of areas that you have previously seen or preloaded. You can view your current location and bookmarks, but can’t use the search as this requires the large CloudMade database that is only available online. You can even add local bookmarks by tapping the map at any location.
Features:
Maps with cache and download function
Online Search for places, cities and features
Bookmarks (offline and online) with internal search
Display of own current location with accuracy indicator
Map scale in kilometres or miles
Storage Space of Offline maps by cities:
City
Most detailed
-1 zoomlevel
-2 zoomlevels
Barcelona, ES
~37 MB
~10 MB
~3 MB
Berlin, DE
~125 MB
~35 MB
~8 MB
Boston (incl. Cambridge), USA
~50 MB
~13.1 MB
~5 MB
London (center), UK
~30 MB
~9 MB
~3 MB
New York (incl. Jersey City), USA
~170 MB
~45 MB
~12 MB
Paris, FR
~60 MB
~15 MB
~4 MB
San Francisco, USA
~75 MB
~20 MB
~6 MB
At the most detailed zoomlevel the screen covers approx. 300 meters in width, at the medium details approx. 600 meters and at the “Important streets” level it covers approx. 1km in width.
As companies like Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft have simplified the process of visualising spatial related information on a map by offering web services/APIs, the popularity and abundance of mapping applications on the web has increased dramatically. While these maps have had a positive effect on most users, not in every case this is applicable. Accessibility needs have often taken a back seat. For example visually impaired web users can find this standardized visualisation as useless. There may be other reasons why a CSS map may be a consideration.
StreetView is now available for the Austrian capital Vienna. But it is not the original StreetView service by Google Maps. The Service is provided by eXtreme Soft Group S.R.L. a private company seated in Bucharest. Their main task is to provide “street-level-imagery”.
The web service allowing its visitors to do virtual walks through cities in Central and Eastern Europe. The images provided to the visitors are taken based on a proprietary technology of generating views that are geo-referenced in the street. The technology consists in using cars equipped with a proprietary panoramic photographing device based on 10 cameras, correlated with a Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS).
The current coverage:
Romania – www.norc.ro – Bucharest, Ploiesti and Prahova Valley, Constanta and the Seaside, Brasov and Poiana Brasov, Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi, Sibiu, Pitesti, Targoviste
Nokia tries to promote their Nokia Maps with a geographical game. It a flash based game where you have to guess the location of different cities around the globe. At the end you can send them their high score and win some prices.
The game might be classified as addictive.
OnionMap is a website with interactive and detailed tourist maps of popular cities across the globe. The maps are embedded in flash and provide rich functionality like zoom, pan but also measurement, add attractions to the map and get attributive and textual information about tourist places. The list of cities which are included in this system is quite big, containing, New York, San Francisco, London, Vienna, Bangkok, Tokyo etc. The look and feel is similar to paper tourist maps and are therefore easy to handle.
For an advertisement of their Network Walkmans Sony traced the subway routes of different cities with their earphones.
There are maps available for the cities New York, Sydney and London, as far as I know. In my optinion its a good marketing gag, since listening to music during travelling with the underground is very popular.
In the picutre above you can see the subway lines of New York on their ad poster. As you can see now Geoinformation become an important field also in advertisement and marketing.
The company Urban Mapping has developed a new kind of paper map, which allows to visualize different layers on a co called Panamap. With their so called MapAction Technology the user can change the view angle to look at different layers of the map.
This is how it works according to their homepage:
Artwork for three views of Manhattan is created and optimized for visual performance. This requires a detailed understanding of typeface, line orientation, color contrast and a host of additional subtle but significant design concerns.
The three Images are interlaced by alternating horizontal strips from each. The resulting compound image is calibrated to a specially designed polymer lens substrate. Lenses contain between 60 to 200 micro-lenses per inch, depending on the desired outcome. This is mounted to a backing, die cut and packaged.
The underlying technology essentially fools the human eye. By rotating the map, the angle of viewing is changed and one of the resulting three layers can be viewed (as demonstrated in the Flash demo at the top of the page).
