Maps Mania

How Poland Drifted to the West

2026-11-03T10:54:33.294-05:00

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Polygons.

At the risk of starting World War III, I've created a map of Poland's Historical Borders. The map uses polygons to show how Poland's borders have changed at different points in its history. The historical boundaries were downloaded from OpenHistoricalMap.

The map includes three snapshots: the semi-autonomous Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1815, the Second Polish Republic immediately before the German and Soviet invasions of 1939, and the post-war borders established in 1945. But rather than simply displaying these three historical boundaries, I thought it would be interesting to use turf.js to calculate how much territory Poland has gained and lost between these different periods.

Turf.js provides the spatial analysis behind three additional map layers. Using its polygon operations, I first calculate the area shared by all three historical boundaries, which I've called Common Ground. I then combine the 1815 and 1939 territories and subtract the 1945 polygon to identify Lost Territory. Finally, I subtract those earlier territories from the 1945 polygon to reveal Gained Territory. Turf.js also calculates the approximate area of each resulting polygon, allowing the map to show not just where the borders changed, but how much land is involved.

The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived

2026-11-03T04:02:04.451-05:00

It seems astonishing to me now that only a fortnight has passed since I climbed to the roof of Maps Mania Tower and proclaimed to the world that the Age of the Pixel Map had begun. And yet here I stand before you today, bearing the sad news of its demise and announcing, with no little ceremony, that The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived.

Two weeks ago, I observed that "One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective." My proposed solution was to create a pixel map offering four distinct viewpoints: North, South, East and West.

But I should have known that this limitation would ultimately prove to be the pixel map's fatal flaw. A pixel represents a two-dimensional square on a flat image. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that it would eventually fall to a successor born into a world of depth and volume. A voxel is essentially a pixel in three dimensions: a tiny cube occupying space rather than a square on a flat surface. Rather than being confined to a single viewpoint (or even four, as I had previously proposed), voxel maps can be rotated freely, allowing you to inspect the landscape from any angle.

The pixel map is dead. Long live the voxel map!

Warsaw in Voxels demonstrates the considerable advantages of this new cartographic order. Created by Piotr Migdał, this interactive, browser-based 3D map of central Warsaw combines OpenStreetMap data with a Minecraft and MagicaVoxel-inspired aesthetic. Built using Three.js, it transforms the Polish capital into a wonderfully detailed voxel landscape.

Essentially, what we have here is a real-world map borrowing techniques from the world of computer games. Alongside changing weather and daylight effects, the map features animated cars and pedestrians moving through the streets. You can even click on these animated figures to automatically switch to a first-person perspective, following their journey through the city as they move around its streets.

A Neon Matterhorn

2026-11-02T09:28:54.061-05:00

For Day 2 of the #30DayMapChallenge, the theme is Lines. For my contribution, I've created MapterGLOW, an interactive 3D terrain map that turns elevation data into glowing neon contour lines.

The map uses elevation tiles from Mapterhorn to build a three-dimensional model of the landscape, overlaid with luminous cyan contour lines at 50-metre intervals. You can rotate the terrain, tilt the camera and zoom in and out to explore the topography from different angles.

You aren't restricted to exploring the Matterhorn, either. The map accepts latitude and longitude coordinates in the URL hash, allowing you to load terrain from different parts of the world. For example, try Mont Blanc, the Eiger or the Jungfrau. You can also substitute your own coordinates to explore other mountain ranges and landscapes.

I built the map using Three.js, loading Mapterhorn's elevation tiles directly into the browser. The elevation data is decoded and resampled into a terrain mesh, which is then used to generate contour lines at regular height intervals. Finally, I added some neon lighting effects to give the contours their distinctive electric-blue glow.

It's a relatively simple experiment in 3D cartography, but I rather like how the glowing contours reveal the shape of the landscape.

Europe Divided by Driving Time

2026-11-02T03:37:22.223-05:00

What if every European capital sent out a car at exactly the same moment, with the aim of reaching every town and village in Europe before its rivals? Which capital would claim the most territory, and how far would its influence extend beyond its own national borders?

If Every European Capital Sent Out a Car at the Same Moment is an intriguing interactive map from Copilot Travel that attempts to answer these questions. It imagines 38 cars setting off simultaneously from 38 European capitals, with each car travelling outwards along the road network at typical driving speeds. Every location in Europe is then assigned to whichever capital's car can reach it first.

The resulting map divides Europe into 38 differently coloured territories, each representing the area that can be reached more quickly from one capital than from any of the others. The visualization is rather like a Voronoi diagram, in which a territory is divided according to the distance from a collection of starting points. However, instead of using straight-line distances to determine where one territory ends and another begins, this map uses travel time. In other words, it creates a kind of time-based Voronoi diagram using road-network isochrones.

You can watch the territories emerge in the animation. As the hours pass, coloured isochrones creep outwards from each capital, following the road network and expanding into neighbouring countries. Eventually, the different territories meet and the whole of Europe is covered by a patchwork of competing capital cities.

You can play or pause the race, drag the timeline to explore how the territories develop hour by hour, or select an individual capital to see the extent of its territory. You can also hover anywhere on the map to discover which capital would reach that location first, along with the arrival times of the next closest competitors. Alternatively, enter the name of a town to discover which capital wins the race there.

If you prefer to travel Europe by Train you can explore train travel times from every European capital (or anywhere else in Europe) using the excellent Chronotrains interactive map.

Via: WeeklyOSM

The #30DayMapChallenge Begins

2026-11-01T04:32:33.932-05:00

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.

How to Navigate the Roman Empire

2026-10-31T04:06:21.550-05:00

The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high.

The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its routes.

Unlike a modern geographical map, the Tabula Peutingeriana makes little attempt to represent the world to scale. Its extraordinary elongated shape, with the Mediterranean compressed into a narrow strip, reflects its real purpose: showing the connections between settlements and the routes linking them. Distances between places are marked in Roman miles, making it an important record of how people could travel across the Roman world.

You can explore this extraordinary document on the Tabula Peutingeriana interactive map. This website allows you to navigate the original map, search for ancient and modern place names, and explore the locations represented on it alongside a contemporary geographical map. I'd recommend starting with the narrated Demo, which provides a guided tour of the interactive map. This is a great introduction to both the original map and to the many features of the interactive version of map.

Another way to explore the Tabula Peutingeriana is through OmnesViae. Select the 'Tabula' option to view an interactive version of the Peutinger map, or choose 'Iter' to open the site's Roman route planner.

OmnesViae allows you to enter a starting point and destination and calculate a route between them using the ancient Roman road network. Rather than simply drawing a modern route between two locations, it reconstructs journeys using the settlements, road connections and distances recorded in the Tabula Peutingeriana. The planner calculates the shortest route using the distances given in the map, allowing you to discover how a journey might have been made in the Roman world.

Famous Place Pictures in Japanese Art

2026-10-30T04:56:47.627-05:00

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai ignited a golden age of Japanese landscape art with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Capturing the topography, seasons, and human activity around Japan's sacred peak, Hokusai’s masterpiece inspired his contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige, to create One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - a breathtaking visual survey of Japan’s bustling capital.

Both series belong to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), "pictures of the floating world," a genre of Edo-period woodblock prints. More specifically, they elevated the sub-genre of Meisho-e (名所絵), or "famous place pictures." Fueled by a 19th-century domestic travel boom, these prints served as both fine art and geographical guides, cataloging iconic landmarks and scenic views for a public eager to explore.

Before single-sheet landscape prints exploded in popularity, publisher-cartographers created Meisho Ki (名所記) - bound, woodblock-printed travel guides that paired pictorial maps of major routes like the Tokaido highway with illustrated sights. Hokusai and Hiroshige were directly drawing on this established cartographic publishing tradition.

Hiroshige's prints, in particular, were closely tied to spatial geography. Publishers often released index sheets - essentially pictorial table-of-contents maps - showing buyers where each view in a series was located along a route or across the city of Edo. This tradition of mapping Japanese Meisho-e (pictures of famous places) has continued into the digital age, with interactive maps now allowing us to explore the real-world landscapes behind these historic prints.

For example, you can explore the landscapes that inspired Hokusai's famous Mount Fuji prints with the Views of Mount Fuji interactive map. Created in ArcGIS Scene Viewer, the map overlays seven of Hokusai's prints onto the actual landscapes they depict. Among them are The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning (also known as South Wind, Clear Sky or Red Fuji), which is shown in the screenshot at the top of this post.

Steven Feldman has now released an interactive map of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. This isn't the first interactive map I've come across featuring Hiroshige's prints. The Ukiyo-e Map, for example, maps not only his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, but also his Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces, Eight Views of Ōmi, and Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. It also includes Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Unfortunately, while the Ukiyo-e Map is perhaps the most comprehensive map of meisho-e (pictures of famous places), it is now missing its basemap. Perhaps Steven could take a sneak peek at the map's JavaScript, which contains the coordinates of all the woodblock prints featured, and use them to expand the scope of his own map.

Alternatively, if you'd like to get the Ukiyo-e Map working again, there's a workaround. Open your browser's developer tools while viewing the map, select the Console, and paste in the following JavaScript code. This will load the necessary libraries and add an OpenFreeMap Positron basemap to the existing Leaflet map.

'(async () => {

// Load required CSS

const css = [

'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.css'

];

css.forEach(url => {

const link = document.createElement('link');

link.rel = 'stylesheet';

link.href = url;

document.head.appendChild(link);

});

// Load JavaScript libraries

function loadScript(url) {

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

const script = document.createElement('script');

script.src = url;

script.onload = resolve;

script.onerror = reject;

document.head.appendChild(script);

});

}

await loadScript(

'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.js'

);

await loadScript(

'https://unpkg.com/@maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet@0.1.1/leaflet-maplibre-gl.js'

);

// Remove the unsuccessful raster layer

mymap.eachLayer(layer => {

if (layer._url?.includes('tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron')) {

mymap.removeLayer(layer);

}

});

// Add OpenFreeMap Positron

L.maplibreGL({

style: 'https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron'

}).addTo(mymap);

console.log('OpenFreeMap Positron added!');

})();'

Hat-tip: Map of the Week

To Infinity & Beyond

2026-10-29T04:23:18.683-05:00

Yesterday I visited the Night Maps exhibition at the Warburg Institute, which explores the history of celestial maps and globes, and how mapping the heavens has shaped our understanding of the world. Which might account for why I was so blown away by TripGeo Space - a brand new collection of space and sci-fi development projects.

Currently, TripGeo Space consists of two interstellar space tours:

I'm not sure how accurately either tour represents the cosmos, or even whether they strictly qualify as maps at all. However, both are really impressive interactive 3D tours - and perhaps the closest I'll ever get to fulfilling my dreams of space travel.

In Solar Trip, you're taken on “a hyper-fast cruise round the real Solar System aboard the luxury starliner Seraphine”. There are plenty of options to customise your voyage. You can choose from several themed trips, including tours of the giant planets, Jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings and the icy worlds beyond Neptune, or plan your own itinerary using the voyage planner.

You can also adjust your travel speed, choose where to begin aboard the ship, and switch between cinematic and relativistic drive effects. During the voyage, you can customise the visual detail, turn narration on or off, and explore the ship itself. My tip is to remember two particularly useful keyboard shortcuts: N skips to the next destination, while Tab opens the voyage planner. Both are handy if you want to get straight to the next stop or plot your own course through the Solar System.

After exploring our Solar System, you should be ready to travel to infinity and beyond with Cosmic Trip. Aboard the survey ship Lumen, you embark on a voyage through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and travelling through the formation of the first stars and galaxies, black holes, stellar nurseries and the many different lives and deaths of stars, before eventually returning home to our own Sun and Earth.

As with Solar Trip, you can explore the ship, customise your journey and adjust the speed of your voyage. Cosmic Trip also features a cosmic timeline, along with science consoles containing articles and infographics that explain the phenomena you encounter along the way.

How the World Draws the World

2026-10-28T04:32:26.581-05:00

I recently shared this map (above) showing the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people playing the Borderline country border game. This combined map brings together all the borders and coastlines drawn by players in Borderline and its companion game, Coastlines.

In Borderline, players attempt to draw the outlines of individual countries on a blank map from memory. The results can be surprisingly interesting, which is why, alongside the global map above, you can also explore How the crowd draws every country.

This multiple-map visualization animates between each country's actual borders and a composite outline created from all the players' attempts to draw it.

This animated map (above), for example, shows the difference between the crowd-drawn UK and its real borders.

Click on any of the individual country maps in How the Crowd Draws Every Country to compare the real country with the players' collective efforts. You can explore differences in area, the westernmost, easternmost, southernmost and northernmost points, and the overall shape of the borders.

You can also sort the multiple maps by most accurate, closest in area or closest in length - to see which countries players have managed to draw most successfully.

Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Manga Universe

2026-10-27T04:15:51.025-05:00

Lately, I’ve been wondering why there's been such a dearth of interesting map styles among all the new "vibe-coded" projects floating around. My guess is that AI toolchains encourage developers to churn out projects at breakneck speed, leaving little time to jump into Maputnik and craft a bespoke style that actually complements their app’s aesthetic.

But just as I was losing hope of ever seeing another genuinely inventive style - reminiscent of the golden age of Stamen's Water Color Map or the Hand Drawn Map of Toulouse, along comes Location Scout (known in Japanese as Dokodemo Rokehan / どこでもロケハン).

Location Scout is an impressive interactive 3D tool that transforms real-world spatial data into manga-style background line art. Enter your home coordinates into the search box, and you can explore your neighborhood rendered as if it were taken straight out of a Japanese comic. The app offers several visual rendering modes - including Color + Lines, Line Art, and a clean Clay (white model) look. It even includes sliders to fine-tune line weight and object outlines.

All this is true of any individual map style - but where Location Scout truly comes into its own is in its 3D view. Clicking the map or selecting the "eye level" perspective drops you directly into a 3D street-level environment. This effectively turns your local neighborhood into a manga environment, allowing you to stroll around your hometown as if walking through a Japanese inspired video game.

Via: Webcurios

North Ain't Up!

2026-10-26T03:28:48.071-05:00

I really, really like North Up Daily. In fact, you could say it has got me in quite a spin!

North Up Daily is a new free daily map game with a simple premise. Each day, you are presented with a map of a city in which all the individual map tiles have been randomly rotated. Your task is to rotate each tile until the map is back to normal, with north pointing up.

Your score is based on how quickly you complete the map, with penalties for the number of moves and hints you use. Solve the puzzle quickly and you could find yourself on the Daily Leaderboard.

North Up Daily is a really original concept for a map game. It reminds me most of my own Scrambled Maps game (now much improved and hosted by TripGeo). Scrambled Maps also splits a city into individual map tiles, but instead of rotating them, you have to put the scrambled tiles back in their correct positions.

I think North Up Daily is a little easier to play than Scrambled Maps, which might just help it attract an even bigger audience.

I shall definitely be playing it daily!

A Fair Election Map for the Midterms

2026-10-24T05:21:17.604-05:00

Will there be fair elections on November 3rd? I can't promise that, but Karim Douieb can promise a fair election map.

His 2026 House Forecast Map replaces the standard geographical congressional district map with one where every district is equal in size. Click the "One seat, one cell" button, and the map morphs from a 'geographic map into one where each state is resized by its seats and every district gets the same area.'

Reading the Battlefield

The interactive map synthesizes data from the Cook Political Report, categorizing all 435 House seats according to race competitiveness ratings:

Solid / Likely / Lean Democrats: 214 seats
Solid / Likely / Lean Republicans: 200 seats
Toss-ups: 21 seats

With 218 needed for a majority, the battleground centers around those 21 toss-up seats - Democrats need just 4 to reach the threshold, while Republicans require 18. Users can order districts by Cook rating or toggle district labels and state outlines to track pivotal seats across the nation.

Land Doesn't Vote

Geographic election maps inherently distort electoral reporting because land doesn't vote, people do. On a standard geographic map, large rural congressional districts - like Alaska’s single district or expansive districts across Montana, Wyoming, and Texas - dominate the visual canvas. Conversely, densely populated urban districts in cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles shrink down to tiny, almost invisible slivers. Because rural areas lean heavily Republican and urban centers lean heavily Democratic, a standard geographic map paints the nation in overwhelming swathes of red, creating a visual illusion that one party holds a massive lead even when an election is virtually deadlocked.

The Cartogram Advantage

Karim Douieb’s map solves this visual bias by using a continuous equal-area cartogram algorithm. By scaling each state to its exact allocation of House seats and dividing them into equal Voronoi cells, every single district gets 1/435th of the visual footprint - exactly matching its weight in the House of Representatives. By animating the smooth transition from geographic shapes into equal-sized cells, the map helps viewers immediately grasp the true election battlefield, giving an accurate picture of the balance of power heading into November.

Have You Had Your Five a Day?

2026-10-23T03:20:13.767-05:00

Cartographers generally agree that there are significant benefits to viewing at least five maps or globes every day. Regular map consumption can help improve your geographical awareness, strengthen your navigational muscles and provide essential nourishment for your inner explorer.

The 5 A Day campaign is based on advice from the International Geographical Union, which recommends playing at least one map game every day to lower the risk of geographical ignorance, chronic misplacement and embarrassing incidents of getting lost.

Fortunately, you don't need to swallow an entire atlas to get your daily geographical intake. Here are three nutritious map games to add to your daily cartographic diet.

1. KnowWhere: World Cities

Think of KnowWhere as your daily serving of geographical greens. Each day, you're presented with five cities and challenged to locate them on an unlabeled map. Drop a pin where you think each city belongs, then answer three questions about each location. The closer your pin is to the correct city, the more points you earn, with a bonus for identifying the right country. Choose Easy or Hard depending on your geographical fitness, or practise with a fixed selection of cities whenever you need an extra helping. It's a healthy combination of map-reading and trivia, guaranteed to put your world knowledge through its paces.

2. MapMinute

For those who prefer their geography served with a generous helping of history, MapMinute offers five historical clues every day. Your task is to identify where each event happened by placing a pin on a satellite globe. Each answer is worth up to 200 points, depending on how close you get to the correct location, giving you a maximum daily intake of 1,000 points. There's no timer, so you can take your time digesting each clue before discovering the correct location and reading the story behind it. With historical discoveries and source material included, MapMinute provides a particularly wholesome blend of geography and history.

3. Licence to Locate

If your geographical diet could use a little international intrigue, Licence to Locate is shaken, not stirred. This unofficial atlas documents 401 James Bond filming locations, but its Daily Dossier is the real daily supplement. Each day, you must identify five locations from the Bond films by clicking their positions on a map. Points are awarded according to how close your guesses are to the actual filming locations. From familiar city streets to exotic beaches and far-flung hideaways, you'll discover whether your knowledge of 007's globe-trotting adventures is genuinely world-class or merely a case of geographical wishful thinking.

So, have you had your five a day? With three different ways to exercise your map-reading muscles, there's no excuse for a geographical deficiency. Consult your atlas, sharpen your pins and remember: a map game a day keeps the misplaced traveller at bay.

Need even more geographical nutrition? Then try 8 Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr.

The World's Most Notable Places.

2026-10-22T03:10:47.891-05:00

Do you remember the World's Most Notable People Map. On Monday, I decided I'd build a World's Most Notable Places Map, showing locations based on their Wikipedia QRank. I abandoned the project today after discovering the Wikipedia Importance Map.

Earlier this month, Wikimedia Enterprise released the Geospatial Wikidata Databset.. This is a large, open dataset that connects geographic features in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with information held in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.

The idea behind the dataset is simple but powerful: OpenStreetMap tells you where things are and provides their geographic shapes, while Wikimedia projects can tell you what they are, why they matter and what is known about them. The dataset does the hard work of linking these sources together, making it easier to query this information without building your own complicated data-processing pipeline.

My bright idea was to use the Geospatial Wikidata Dataset to create A Map of the World's Most Notable Places, using Wikidata's QRank. QRank is a ranking signal for Wikidata entities, which correspond to subjects represented in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It measures their relative popularity across the whole Wikimedia ecosystem.

Which brings us to the Wikipedia Importance Map. The Wikipedia Importance Map maps geolocated Wikipedia articles around the world, with the size of each label reflecting the importance of the subject. The map combines two different measures of importance: PageRank, which analyses how Wikipedia articles link to one another across all language editions, and QRank, which uses pageviews to measure how popular articles are. The result is an interactive map that lets you explore the world through the subjects that attract the most attention on Wikipedia.

Even more interestingly, the map doesn't limit itself to articles with their own geographic coordinates. It also includes around 2.5 million subjects that can be associated with a place, such as people mapped to their birthplace, paintings to their museum, battles to where they were fought, and companies to their headquarters. These are displayed as colored dots, spread around the relevant town or city.

There is also a second map, the Wikivoyage Travel Map, which uses Wikivoyage data to map destinations and travel recommendations. It includes places to see, things to do, shopping, eating, drinking and sleeping, with their size determined by how often travellers read about them.

Exploring the places with the highest QRank in a particular area is an interesting way to discover its most prominent landmarks, people and historical events. It can help you identify places to visit, uncover local stories or simply find out what makes a particular town or city notable.

One caveat: a large label indicates importance according to the map's combined ranking signals, not necessarily historical significance or how worthwhile a place is to visit. It's a discovery tool, rather than a definitive guide to the world's most important places.

Pixelate the World

2026-10-21T03:11:24.015-05:00

One of the biggest trends in online mapping this year has definitely been pixelating the world.

Back in January, software engineer and artist Andy Coenen released his interactive, isometric pixel-art map of New York City: Isometric NYC. Since then, other developers have jumped on the bandwagon, and we now have:

Isopolis - isometric San Francisco
London, drawn - isometric London
earthtoPixels - isometric João Pessoa, Brasil

One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective. This is not really an oversight on the developer’s part, but rather a reflection of the sheer effort involved. To offer full 360-degree rotation, a creator would need to repeat the entire laborious pipeline - sourcing aerial map tiles, rendering them, applying pixel styling, and stitching the output into a deep-zoom map - four separate times, once for each compass direction (North, East, South, and West).

Perhaps that "laborious pipeline" could be shared.

London now boasts two interactive, isometric pixel-art maps. Tiny London is the second pixelated view of the capital I’ve seen, and it takes a completely different angle from London, drawn. Where London, drawn unexpectedly placed West at the top, Tiny London goes with the traditional North-facing orientation.

If the developers behind Tiny London and London, drawn were to collaborate, they would already be halfway toward creating a fully interactive, 360-degree isometric pixel-art map of London.

London is Bigger than Colorado

2026-10-20T03:09:31.777-05:00

London is twice as big as Colorado on the Actual Scale map.

Size comparison maps are nothing new. You’ve almost certainly used The True Size Of ... to drag the outlines of countries around a world map and compare their geographical sizes.

Actual Scale uses a similar drag-to-compare interface, but instead of geographical size, it compares population. Search for any city, state or country and drag its outline anywhere on the world map. The outline will grow or shrink to reflect the population density of the area it covers, while keeping the same total population.

In the image above, I’ve dragged London across the United States. Its boundary adjusts to encompass the same population wherever it lands. Drop London over New York, for example, and it suddenly looks a lot smaller!

Dragging places around on Actual Scale can be surprising. We tend to think of cities and countries in terms of their geographical footprint, but Actual Scale offers a different perspective, revealing just how unevenly people are distributed across the planet. It’s a clever new way to explore population size and compare the population density of different cities and countries.

There are 89,603 Dogs in New York City

2026-10-19T03:01:07.453-05:00

There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City.

Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog's name, breed and birth year, along with the owner's ZIP code.

Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city's dog population has changed over time.

Using the map you can search for a breed, a dog's name, or a neighborhood to discover where your pooch would fit in - and where they would stand out from the crowd. The map is colored by the most common dog breed in each neighborhood.

Labrador Retrievers (including crossbreeds) lead in 75 of the 197 neighborhoods, followed by Yorkshire Terriers in 58 and Shih Tzus in 39. You can also explore the breeds that are most distinctive to particular areas: those that appear disproportionately often compared with their citywide popularity.

There are plenty of other ways to dig into the data. You can filter the map by borough, highlight neighborhoods with above-average numbers of dogs per home, or hide the quarter of neighborhoods with the fewest dogs. And if you fancy a little canine cartographic mischief, you can even sink Staten Island.

The map sidebar includes links to some intriguing trends in the city's dog population. For example the huge 25% jump in dogs born in 2020 and the end of New York's French Bulldog boom in 2016.

Via: Webcurios

What is Your Walk Score?

2026-10-17T02:51:02.091-05:00

Walk Score provides address-level walkability scores, neighborhood maps, transit reports, and bike scores for virtually every city, town, and neighborhood in the U.S. and Canada. Integrated into real estate platforms such as Redfin, it is well-known and widely used across North American real estate markets. Unfortunately, its coverage outside North America is patchy.

This is why Raian Pollock decided to create Walkably.

Walkably maps walkability across 31 European countries, giving every street a score from 0 to 100. The scores are calculated from two factors: Reach (60% of the score) and Street Quality (40%).

Reach measures how far you have to walk along actual streets to reach eight everyday amenities: groceries, food and drink, shops, healthcare, schools, parks, cultural venues and public transport. The closer these amenities are, the higher the score. The availability of multiple nearby destinations also matters, so a street with several grocery stores within walking distance scores better than one with just a single option.

Street Quality assesses how pleasant the surrounding streets are for walking, taking into account traffic, noise, summer shade, nearby busy roads and slope. The shade estimates combine building-height data with tree maps, while noise data is included where city noise maps are available. Walkably also prevents locations with poor street quality from achieving the very highest scores, even if they are close to amenities.

You can search for an address or click any cell on the map to explore its score and see how it was calculated. Walkably identifies the nearest destinations in each of the eight categories, gives estimated walking times, and highlights the best and weakest streets nearby. It also compares walking times with places across Europe, allowing you to see whether your local amenities are closer or further away than they are for most Europeans.

What America Looks Like After 700 Meters of Sea Level Rise

2026-10-16T02:01:07.863-05:00

Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters?

The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters - meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment.

If you’re looking to explore actual, science-backed climate projections rather than wild cartographic extremes, Climate Central's Coastal Risk Finder is probably a better sea level rise map. However, Sliding Shores does offer a more dynamic, global perspective by rendering the entire planet as a 3D interactive globe rather than as a flat 2D map.

Rather than sticking strictly to realistic sea level forecasts, the map features 16 pre-set, extreme planetary scenarios - ranging from catastrophic rises like total ice sheet melt (+70m) or drowning Mt. Everest (+8,849m), down to dramatic ocean drop-offs like the Last Ice Age coastline (-120m) or draining the oceans entirely (-11,000m).

Travel Blogging & Mapping

2026-10-15T03:27:42.154-05:00

There are travel blogs and then there is Three Steps Off the Coast.

For the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey (now accompanied by their son Victor and pet dog) have been documenting their travels and sharing their photos, stories, itineraries, and budgets with the world on their popular travel blog. Now, to celebrate their ten-year anniversary of travel blogging, they have brought to life their 10 most memorable trips as immersive 3D travel maps.

10 Years, 10 Adventures is a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements, and trip narration. Instead of relying on standard mapping libraries like Mapbox or Google Maps SDKs, the project uses a bespoke WebGL rendering engine paired with custom heightmap and route data.

Each trip features an interactive playback that acts as a media player. Users can "Start the trip" to follow an automated 3D camera flight synchronized with custom audio narration and an interactive elevation profile. You can quickly pan and zoom to featured locations on the route using the links in the map sidebar or by dragging the elevation timeline.

In the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey have visited some stunning locations around the world. From the volcanic shores of Martinique and the dramatic peaks of Iceland to the misty Isle of Skye and the towering Canadian Rockies, 10 Years, 10 Adventures now offers some breathtaking tours of their personal highlights. Take the controls and explore all ten stunning 3D maps on the Trois Pas de Côté anniversary site.

The New Age of Building Age Maps Has Begun

2026-10-14T03:09:34.457-05:00

The new era of building age maps has begun. Block and Paper have been busy recently creating animated building-age maps of cities around the world, showing urban development unfold over time. The style has since been emulated by others, including Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County.

Now Alexander Bogachev has imported the idea to France, creating an animated building-age map of Paris that shows when each of the French capital's 122,435 buildings was constructed.

Paris, Building by Building provides an animated timeline of the construction of Paris since the year 900. One of the most surprising findings of this chronology is how much of Paris was built after the famous Haussmann period. According to the map, only one building in fifteen dates from 1851 to 1870, the era associated with Baron Haussmann's transformation of the city. Six times as many buildings were actually constructed during the Belle Époque, between 1871 and 1914.

Paris, Building by Building, offers more than an animated journey through the architectural history of Paris. Bogachev has introduced two features that make this building age map particularly interesting to explore.

The first allows you to isolate any street in Paris and view its buildings side by side. Selecting a street removes all the other buildings from the map, making it much easier to focus on the ages of the buildings along that particular stretch of road. It's a simple but effective way to compare the architectural history of individual streets without the distraction of the surrounding city.

The second feature lets you step down to street level and explore Paris in 3D. Switch to the street-level panorama to see the city from a first-person perspective, then walk around and explore. The buildings remain coloured according to their construction dates, so you can investigate Paris's architectural history from the ground as well as from above.

Together, these features turn the map into more than a chronological visualization. You can watch Paris grow through the decades, compare the buildings along a single street, and then wander through a 3D version of the city to see its architectural history up close.

Via: Datawrapper's Data Vis Dispatch

The World is Your War Zone

2026-10-12T04:04:00.000-05:00

There are quite a few ugly buildings in my town that I'd like to demolish. Now I have the chance to actually knock them down (if only virtually) with World Strike.

World Strike is a fun new open-world, real-time multiplayer tank game where the arena is literally the entire planet - and every single building can be reduced to rubble. So if you’ve ever looked at a building and thought, "This would benefit from some high-explosive ordnance," then World Strike is the browser game you've been waiting for.

From a web mapping perspective, World Strike is an impressive technical showcase of Three.js integrated directly inside MapLibre GL JS. Rather than rendering standard extruded vector tiles via MapLibre's built-in fill-extrusion layers, the developer routes OpenStreetMap footprint data into a custom Three.js WebGL layer.

This unlocks a depth of visual detail rarely seen in interactive map games:

Procedural Architectural Rendering: Buildings feature detailed windows complete with illusionary interior depth ("rooms behind the windows").

Synchronized Destruction Mechanics: Buildings don't simply vanish when hit. Instead, they collapse section-by-section based on damage hitboxes.

Persistent Multiplayer State: Rubble from destroyed structures remains on the map for all connected players, transforming recognisable urban landscapes into persistent warzones.

World Strike pushes the boundary of what can be done with Three.js canvas integration inside MapLibre. For another example of map data used with Three.js you can try playing my own Hunt for Red Octangles game.

Mapping the Cosmos

2026-10-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

Want to explore the night sky? Two new interactive maps offer very different ways to do it. Skyviewer lets you explore the vast astronomical survey being created by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, while Stargazing for Beginners helps you work out what you can actually see in the sky above you.

Skyviewer is an interactive window onto Rubin Observatory's survey of the cosmos. Located in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for the next ten years, creating an enormous time-lapse record of the changing universe. You can use Skyviewer to explore the results from these scans, navigating around Rubin's imagery to discover stars, galaxies and other celestial objects.

The experience also includes Skysynth, which turns this visual exploration into a sonified journey through the cosmos.

If Skyviewer is about exploring the universe, Stargazing for Beginners is about exploring the sky above your head. The interactive sky map uses your location and the current time to show what is visible, with a mobile orientation mode that lets you point your phone at the sky to identify objects.

You can speed up time to watch the sky change over hours or days, filter objects by type and limiting magnitude, and search for individual stars and other celestial objects. The map also includes altitude charts, twilight information and a calendar of upcoming astronomical events.

There is even an astronomical events layer showing rise and set times, lunar phases, Moon perigee and apogee, equinoxes and solstices, planetary events and conjunctions, meteor-shower peaks, eclipses and future planetary transits. You can therefore use the map not just to see what is in the sky now, but to find out what astronomical events you might be able to watch in the future.

Animated Map Videos

2026-10-09T02:00:00.000-05:00

Ever wished you could turn your holiday GPS track into one of those slick animated maps you see in travel videos? Map Animator lets you do exactly that - and you don't need any video-editing or mapping skills to get started.

This free browser-based tool lets you draw a journey on a map or import a GPX recording and then turn it into an animated video. You can use it for road trips, motorcycle tours, cycling adventures, hikes, sailing trips and pretty much any other journey you can record with a GPS device.

There are plenty of ways to customise the appearance of the animation. You can choose different map styles, add place-name signs and markers, and even add your own photographs to the route. Photo signs appear as the animated route reaches the location where the photograph was taken, briefly popping up like instant prints before shrinking down to a small circular photo. For a more elaborate presentation you can also switch on 3D vehicles, complete with little animated details such as a wake behind a boat, smoke from a train or footsteps for a walking route.

The resulting animations can be exported as MP4 video in 1080p, 2K or 4K, with frame rates from 24 to 60fps. You can choose from landscape, portrait, square and other formats, making the resulting clips suitable for dropping straight into a video editor.

If you're looking for a quick way to turn a GPS track into an animated map for a travel video, Map Animator is an impressively capable solution that manages to keep the whole process simple. Best of all, everything happens in your browser, so your routes, photos and videos stay on your own computer rather than being uploaded to external servers.

GeoFactGuessr

2026-10-08T02:42:00.000-05:00

FactMap is the latest map game to be a little like GeoGuessr. However instead of guessing the locations of random Street View images, in this game you need to point to the locations of five daily historical or geographical facts.

FactMap gives you a fact and asks you to work out where on Earth it happened. The answer might be the place where a famous person died, where a treaty was signed, where a band formed, or where a particular animal lives. For example, one question might ask: Where did Julius Caesar die? You then drop a pin on the map and see how close you were.

There are five questions every day, with everyone receiving the same set of questions. Each round is worth up to 1,000 points, with a maximum daily score of 5,000. The closer your pin is to the correct location, the more points you receive. The scoring is based on straight-line distance, although the game sensibly makes some questions more forgiving than others. Pinpointing a city is one thing; trying to identify the exact location of a shipwreck in the middle of an ocean is quite another.

You can also ask for a hint if you're completely stuck. However, using a hint reduces the maximum score for that round from 1,000 to 750, so there is a trade-off between playing it safe and taking a guess.

Five new facts arrive every day at midnight (Paris time).

Via: webcurios