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| April 8 · Issue #15 · View online |
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Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.
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Hello? Is this thing on? Do you even remember who this is? It turns out that my little break from Spatial Awareness ended up as 4 whole months without a single issue. Whoops! While I’ve never wanted to promise a strict schedule, and the break has been needed, I do feel bad for leaving things so long. The good news is that I’m raring to go again. And don’t worry, I’ve been keeping an eye on the community the entire time so I have a stupid amount of amazing content in a backlog ready to be shared. And who knew so much could happen in 4 short months? It turns out that the entire world turns upside down once Spatial Awareness stops, so I best not do that again 😬 In more personal news (and part of the reason for the downtime), I’ve recently started a full-time position as a Senior Principal Engineer at Wood Mackenzie. My role there is focused around spatial data and mapping and I’m excited to sink my teeth into things. Hopefully I can share some of my work there in the near future — I promise it’ll be interesting. Also, at the end of the year I posted my 2010 to 2020 retrospective, which is a candid overview of the past decade and the journey to where I am today. The Spatial Awareness community gets an honourable mention. Please stay safe, and I wish you all well.
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Aerial embroidery
I absolutely love anything spatial that has been created in ways you wouldn’t expect, and this aerial embroidery by Victoria Rose is no exception! The attention to detail is so good that they look like real aerial imagery, especially with the sheep and little 3D trees. Cute! Want one of these for yourself? Victoria has an Etsy store where you can buy them, though you need to be quick as they look to sell out quickly. |
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Dutch railways annual report
This visualisation by Jan Willem Tulp is a perfect example of thinking outside the box. It’s such a clever way of looking at temporal spatial data and visualising it in a way that lets you comprehend the spatial component while keeping the context of the historical, temporal component. Really great stuff. 👌 |
Blender visualisation with clouds
It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for spatial visualisations created in Blender, I’ve certainly featured them enough in this newsletter. This one by Sean Conway is a little different as he’s added lovely puffy clouds that add an extra element of realism. I’d love to hear more about how this was made! |
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Tron-like videos from SAR constellation
If you’re not familiar with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) then I’d highly recommend taking a look. It’s a fascinating area of remote sensing that’s being used in a growing number of areas, particularly because it can ‘see’ through clouds and can even be used at night. This video from ICEYE shows how SAR can be used to monitor movement on the ground, which is pretty impressive. The video is worth a watch for the visuals and soundtrack alone — it’s very Tron-like.
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Radio Garden
While not strictly spatial, this fun website lets you explore obscure radio stations from around the world using a 3D map in your browser. It has been created by Jonathan Puckey and his team and it’s quite addictive — I’ve found plenty of great radio stations as a result. In fact, I’m listening to one right now as I write this issue! |
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3D Streetmix visualisations
Streetmix is a really useful tool for quickly prototyping new layouts for streets. What if you removed vehicle traffic altogether? Or what if you put in a protected cycle path? It also looks great, though the 2D visuals can often be limiting when trying to properly visualise the plans in your head. Fortunately, Kieran Farr has created a tool that takes a Streetmix link and creates a dynamic 3D visualisation of it, complete with moving vehicles and everything! It really helps to get a better context of what the changes would look like in the real world. |
Recent updates to Mapbox GL JS
The Mapbox team have continued to churn out release after release for Mapbox GL JS, with countless new features since the last issue of the newsletter. Major improvements include a new LOD-based tiling system (in preparation for relaxing tilt limits) as well as improved performance for raster layers and hill-shading. There’s also a new operator for applying styling or filters based on features that are contained within a GeoJSON shape, which is really useful.
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getlon.lat — Help! I need a geocoder
Have you ever looked at the terms of service or licence restrictions when choosing a spatial platform? Did you know that some platforms don’t let you use them if you use OpenStreetMap? It’s a minefield. This website by Steve Bennett does a great job of collating many of the popular geocoding services, allowing you to quickly compare them and see which ones permit third-party basemaps, as well as how much they cost. Very handy! |
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How to make a beautiful map
Who doesn’t want to make a beautiful map? Aside from a catchy title, this tutorial by Boris Müller goes into detail on how he and Fabian Ehmel created a lovely butterfly projection map. You’ll find out all the tools they used, the data, as well as the process to get to the final result you can see above. Most of the detail is lost in the tiny image on this newsletter, I recommend having a read of the original post and looking at the high-resolution map as it’s really good.
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Amazing 3D rendering with Aerialod
Alasdair Rae has put together a guide on how to use the amazing Aerialod tool (covered in a previous issue) and his tips for getting the most out of it. It’s a fun tool and it allows you to produce some stunning 3D images in a relatively short period of time.
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Mapzen project updates
Some news that put a smile on my face recently was seeing that the various Mapzen projects are still alive and kicking. They produced a large number of innovative projects in all areas of the spatial scene before Mapzen shut down; including tile-based routing, WebGL maps, vector tile hosting, and much more. This post rounds up many of the new features and updates over the past year or so. I’m glad to see they’re still alive and kicking.
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Behind the scenes of a Planet satellite launch
Ever wondered what happens after a satellite is launched? I know I have. This post by Planet delves into the process they go through from first contact with their satellites all the way through to capturing their first image and integration within their wider platform.
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UP42 — The open platform for Earth data and analytics
I’m a little late to the party on this one. UP42 was launched a while ago now, a new platform for accessing and processing Earth observation data. I have to admit that I’ve not used it myself yet, but it looks slick and they have a fancy workflow feature that lets you re-use AI and processing logic created by others. It looks amazing and I’ll definitely be making time to give them a proper go.
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OpenSkyNetwork data during the pandemic
Air travel has been affected particularly negatively by the current pandemic, with some airlines and airports effectively closing down entirely. What’s interesting is that ADS-B tracking data is being constantly collected, and as a result we’re now able to create some interesting analysis and visualisations that span the period before and after the pandemic took hold.
Craig Taylor (who’s maps I’ve featured before) has been kind enough to pull together air traffic data from OpenSkyNetwork for anyone else to download and take a look at.
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How to do map stuff — April 29th, 2020
If it’s possible to find a silver lining with this pandemic, it would be the way the spatial community has come together to help each other out and share knowledge. So many physical events have been cancelled this year and it’s been amazing to see everyone sharing blog posts, live streams and everything in between.
Daniel Huffman has taken this a step further and organised a free virtual workshop event on April 29th. It’s a day-long event and the schedule can be found on the link above — it’s a who’s who of the mapping community. I cannot wait!
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Videos from FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2019
All the videos from the FOSS4G Oceania event from last year are now online. There’s tonnes of them with presentations covering a diverse range of topics. Most are 20 minutes long so a nice length to watch without having to invest too much time.
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How to map an island in the Pacific
One of my favourite map-makers David Garcia has started a newsletter about his unique experiences and stories behind why he creates maps. His first issue is already out for you to read at your leisure, it’s well worth it. |
Rainfall Rescue
So it turns out people get bored when they’re isolated at home, though this has proven a boon for climate scientists. The Rainfall Rescue project is a way for people with spare time to help digitise decades of old paper rainfall data so it can be analysed and integrated into climate studies. It’s proven incredibly popular and successful!
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#mapsathome
Finally, I’d like to end this issue with #mapsathome, a great hashtag on Twitter that’s packed full of people sharing random maps and map-related objects that are within their home. I want them all!
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So what do you think about this issue? What did you like? What didn’t you like? What did I miss that I should cover in the next issue? If you liked it then please click on the thumbs up button below as it helps me work out general sentiment. Plus the feedback helps give me energy to keep this going. Don’t forget that you can reach me on Twitter to send feedback, suggestions for content or if you just want to say hi. I’m also posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff there. See you in the next one. 👋
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