Laser Backpack

A laser equipped, picture taking, inertia sensing backpack that will enable you to instantly map rooms by walking into them.

Link
Via Gizmodo

Global Map of California

Someone dug up this old map that Paramount Pictures created as a guide to where filmmakers could imitate different world geographies within California.

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Via Neatorama

American Migration Patterns

Cool interactive map at Forbes.com, allowing you to see the migration patterns of your county. Who's moving in and who's moving out.

I've always heard people in Colorado complaining about Texans and Californians moving to town. Looks like California (particularly SoCal) might be justified, but there are as many people moving to Texas as from Texas. Looks like we should be complaining about Floridians and Northeasterners, while folks in Oregon and Washington are probably whining about the Coloradization of their towns.

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Via BoingBoing

Maps that Changed the World

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Via Planetizen

LIDAR Mapping for Archaeology

Another LIDAR example, finding hidden insights about an ancient mayan city by looking through the tree cover. They can see roads, terraces, and buildings they never knew about before.

We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.

Link

LIDAR Mapping for Solar Access

Sanborn (a Colorado company!) is flying over New York City using LIDAR to create a hyper-accurate 3-D model of the city.

The data will be used, among other things, to create up-to-date maps of the areas most prone to flooding, the buildings best suited for the installation of solar power and the neighborhoods most in need of trees.

Link
Via Planetizen

Autonomous 3-D Interior Mapping

Amazing video of a robot built to search and map unfamiliar interior environments without any remote control. Imagine setting one of these suckers loose in a building to do a building survey.



Link

Via Digital Urban

Tunnels

A roundup of cool maps of tunnel systems.

Link

Via Kottke

Sitcom Map

I think Colorado looks pretty good on this map. The Southeast - not so good.

Via Impact Lab

Finding Atlantis

Interesting description of how the ocean floor is mapped.

Some have speculated that these are the plow marks of seafloor farming by aliens. If there really are little green men hiding somewhere, the ocean's not a bad place to do it. Mars, Venus, the moon, and even some asteroids are mapped at far higher resolution than our own oceans (the global map of Mars is about 250 times as accurate as the global map of our own ocean).

Link

Via Kottke

Great Exploration Maps

Nifty map showing some of the great voyages in history and literature. If you're in the travelling mood.

Link

via Kottke

Walmart's Spread

Doug sent this out to everyone, but it's worth putting up here too. Some smart person has put together a really cool looking visualization of the spread of Walmart stores across the country.

Link

Thanks Doug

Walking Directions in Google Maps

Now you can get walking directions from Google Maps. It looks like they're still not aware of all of the walking paths available, but still cool.

See below:


View Larger Map

via Google LatLong

Street Level Views on Google

Google released a new feature today: Street level views in some locations. If you go to Google Maps and zoom into Denver, Chicago, New York, or a bunch of other cities, you'll see a button at the top for Street Level Views. Basically, you can walk down any street in downtown Denver, seeing the street trees, storefronts, with street names layed over the top of it. It's definitely worth a test drive.

Incidentally, the company that provided the imagery, which was collected while driving a truck equipped with a 12-sided video camera capturing a spherical, georeferenced viewpoint, licensed the technology to the military before this new partnership with Google. See the press release here.

Good stuff for map nerds.