Upgrades for Google Maps Street View

Google is rolling out upgraded cars with upgraded camera rigs to capture Street View imagery. The new camera rig will help capture photos that are clearer, higher in resolution, and more vivid in color. Like the old design, the rig will attach to a vehicle’s roof, but the smaller ball on top now features just …

Create interactive SVG maps in React with react-simple-maps

react-simple-maps is a library of React components to make SVG maps using d3-geo and topojson. react-simple-maps → Whilst looking further I’ve stumbled upon these two Medium posts detailing an implementation: How to create pure react SVG maps with topojson and d3-geo → Mapping Tutorial: Combining Victory Charts and React-Simple-Maps →

D3 in Depth: Rendering Geographic Information

D3 in Depth has dedicated a chapter to rendering geographic information. D3’s approach differs to so called raster methods such as Leaflet and Google Maps. Typically D3 requests vector geographic information in the form of GeoJSON and renders this to SVG or Canvas in the browser. D3 in Depth: Rendering Geographic Information →

Every Solar Eclipse Happening in your Lifetime

The Washington Post has created a nice article on the upcoming solar eclipse that will cross the United States On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible from the contiguous United States. It’ll be the first to traverse coast to coast in nearly a century. There will be 69 total solar eclipses visible …

The problem with maps // Playing with Projections

One of the core ideas covered in my talk named “Geoshizzle” on mapping is that the Mercator projection is way overdue. It’s main feature of preserving angle measurements is no longer feasible in this time and age (it was back when you were sailing a boat to get somewhere), and it’s distortion of areas has …

Google Maps’s Quiet Transformation

Justin O’Beirne kept an eye on how a specific area evolved on Google Maps and on Apple Maps over time: Patricia’s Green is the centerpiece of a vibrant and trendy neighborhood in central San Francisco, just blocks away from City Hall. I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps. Thirteen …

Using Machine Learning to Predict Parking Difficulty

No monitoring of parking meters, video feeds, etc. Looking at the users their behavior is the way to do it: Google determined that if users circled around a location like in the picture above, it usually suggested that parking might be difficult. To recognize this behavior, they took the difference between when they should have …

Crafting Data-Driven Maps

At Uber, we use maps for everything — visualizing millions of geo data points, monitoring road conditions, and advocating for policy change in cities around the world. Over the last few years we have experienced immense growth. As a result, we have many teams across the organization producing map visualizations for a wide range of needs. We …