Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Maps Mania
Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France. My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain. The map was created using Three.js, with elevation data from Mapterhorn, a service providing terrain elevation data for creating 3D maps of the Earth's surface. The elevation data was downloaded as a GeoTIFF, a georeferenced image format which stores geographic information alongside the elevation values for each pixel. This data was then converted into a 3D terrain model. The walking route was plotted separately using geojson.io, an online tool for creating and editing GeoJSON geographic data. The resulting LineString was added to the 3D terrain and animated, with its height adjusted to follow the contours of the landscape. My map is not a patch on the maps in 10 Years, 10 Adventures, but I'm happy with the results so far. With a little vibe-coding help from ChatGPT, the map only took 3-4 hours to develop. I probably won't take the project much further, as I suspect the map isn't of much interest to anybody else. However, there are plenty of ways I could improve it, including adding more photographs and points of interest, incorporating additional walking routes, and perhaps even adding narration to turn it into a more complete virtual tour of the peninsula. Read the original article at Maps Mania. Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.
Bert Spaan has taken Mapterhorn's global terrain data to create an interactive global Relief map. What is particularly interesting about this new map is that, unlike traditional topographic maps with a fixed colour-to-elevation scale, the map's colour spectrum adapts dynamically to the specific region or bounds currently in view. As you pan and zoom across different landscapes, the colour grading shifts to highlight local topographic variations, producing a striking and constantly changing view of the world's mountains, valleys and plains. This works particularly well when switching between very different environments: the colour range changes to bring out the relief at the scale you're viewing, rather than leaving low-lying terrain looking uniformly flat. A number of controls allow you to adjust how the elevation data is visualized. You can switch between absolute and visible elevation ranges, lock the current colour range, reverse the colours, animate the colours, and cycle through different ways of handling elevation outliers. You can also turn on hillshading, contours, labels and country borders, or switch to a 3D terrain view. Relief also includes a Seafloor option, which extends the elevation map beneath the oceans using GEBCO bathymetry. The result is a continuous view of the Earth's topography, from the deepest ocean trenches to the highest mountain peaks. At its core Relief is a WebGL-powered visualization of Mapterhorn's global elevation data that allows you to explore global topography at different resolutions and levels of detail. To see some of the most beautiful highlights of this data click on the 'Explore' button in the map's menu bar. Read the original article at ${post.title} on ${blog.title}. Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.
More in cartography
Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France. My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain. The map was created using Three.js, with elevation data from Mapterhorn, a service providing terrain elevation data for creating 3D maps of the Earth's surface. The elevation data was downloaded as a GeoTIFF, a georeferenced image format which stores geographic information alongside the elevation values for each pixel. This data was then converted into a 3D terrain model. The walking route was plotted separately using geojson.io, an online tool for creating and editing GeoJSON geographic data. The resulting LineString was added to the 3D terrain and animated, with its height adjusted to follow the contours of the landscape. My map is not a patch on the maps in 10 Years, 10 Adventures, but I'm happy with the results so far. With a little vibe-coding help from ChatGPT, the map only took 3-4 hours to develop. I probably won't take the project much further, as I suspect the map isn't of much interest to anybody else. However, there are plenty of ways I could improve it, including adding more photographs and points of interest, incorporating additional walking routes, and perhaps even adding narration to turn it into a more complete virtual tour of the peninsula. Read the original article at Maps Mania. Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.
Last year, I created a new map projection, the Asymmetric Monstrosity, designed to make somewhat of an artistic and educational statement about projections in general. I also made a physical world map to demonstrate it. Of course, there is a huge difference between a projection and an individual map that uses that projection (a distinction … Continue reading Asymmetric Monstrosity: Home Edition →
In a recent post on Attila Bátorfy's Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities, he highlighted the Czech-born geographer and statistician Anton Leo Hickmann and his early contributions to data visualization. Hickmann’s most influential work, the Geographisch-statistischer Universal-Taschen-Atlas, was published in 1894. You can view it from the Austrian National Library. it’s full of interesting charts and maps but what got my attention was this diagram. I’ve posted before about comparative mountain heights. There’s even a post on the David Rumsey Map Collection showing many different examples of these but this one is new to me. Note that I stitched two atlas pages together to make the image above. The title translated from German is “Idealized view of the most significant highs and lows“. This graphic has two layers, the top one for mountain heights sitting over a layer of sea and ocean depths. The top panel shows Europe in the foreground and from left to right Africa, Asia, South America New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii. Mount Saint Elias (straddling the U.S. and Canada) is the only North America peak shown*, Denali must have been unknown to Hickmann. Here’s a detail with the Balkans in front and Amerika (mostly south and central) in the background. The second layer has the ocean depths with major seas layered on top of them, a clever way of showing many bodies of water in the same illustration. A second grouping underneath mirrors the top ones with a focus on the Alps atop the Mediterranean Sea and its affiliated bodies of water. Here’s a detail from the third and fourth panels with the Mediterranean and Ligurian Seas on the bottom, Bern on the foreground and some of the high peaks of the Alps in the background. *Not counting Hawaii as North America. Also Mt Hooker is a name that appears in many places but none of them are close to 4185 meters. For a deep dive into the rest of Hickmann’s atlas see Atilla’s post.
Adding a hillshade terrain to your basemap can give the map reader incredible amounts of information about the surface of the earth. But it’s also a mechanism for adding visual charm and interest to a map! With emotional resonance and technical merit bound up together in such a way, how can you possibly resist that …
As I often mock the AI-slop maps that I see on X (“Twitter”), my account has apparently responded by sending even more garbage my way. One example recently caught my attention as perhaps the worst map that I had ever seen. Then, several days later, I encountered something even worse. The first map, from the […] The post Is This the Worst Map in Current Circulation? No, It Is This One! appeared first on GeoCurrents.
