prosthetic knowledge

The world is an abstract comic 

Abstract Comics (a blog which explores the idea of using the comic panel technique with abstract visuals) has a small collection of images from Google Earth which fits into it’s ideas.

More Here

Laser Cut Street Map Videos 

CutMaps is an Etsy store which creates intricate mountable street maps cut from boards and framed. Here are two videos showing the process in action:

Cut Maps are laser cut street maps of the world’s most famous and recognizable cities. These maps are cut from high quality recycled mounting board and framed. You may choose any color combination you wish.

More at CutMaps here

Instant Streetview 

Instant results for Google Streetview searches in as-you-type format:

Simply start typing an address, place name or location, to be instantly taken there via Google Street View.

If no Street View exists at the location, or if your search is too broad (e.g. “France”), a map will be shown instead.

Abstract Season Changes by Le Rane Acide

A Tumblr blog which collects examples of seasonal differences found on Google Maps.

More Here

Satellite Collections by Jenny Odell 

Series of digital prints collates types of objects found on Google Satellite View and places them together:

In all of these prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View— parking lots, silos, landfills, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here.

The alienation provided by the satellite perspective reveals the things we take for granted to be strange, even absurd. Banal structures and locations can appear fantastical and newly intricate. Directing curiosity toward our own inimitably human landscape, we may find that those things that are most recognizably human (a tangle of carefully engineered water slides, for example) are also the most bizarre, the most unlikely, the most fragile.

More Here

The Amazing iOS 6 Maps 

Inevitable Tumblr blog of the day, subtitled “The Apple iOS 6 Maps are amazing. Not.”

It works on various levels - a blog of mockery, glitch art, incorrect information, and plenty of sarcasm.

You can check out the blog here

Project ‘Ground Truth’ - How Google Builds It’s Maps 

Fascinating article on the workings on Google Maps and how it relates to the bigger picture of personal information technology - via The Atlantic:

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you’re drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B — and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It’s the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or “Ground Truth,” actually works. 

The company opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you’re searching has become almost important as what you’re searching. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple’s iOS.

And for good reason. If Google’s mission is to organize all the world’s information, the most important challenge — far larger than indexing the web — is to take the world’s physical information and make it accessible and useful.

“If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online,” Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. “Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”

More Here

Googlegeist 

Tumblr blog / art project by Chadwick Gibson, exploring the line where digital art and Google image data merge.

More Here

ASCII Street View by Teehan+Lax Labs 

Interactive, brower-based WebGL-powered text-mode view of Google Streetview panoramas. Available in colour and green-terminal modes:

Real-time Ascii Art conversion of Google Street View panorama’s done in WebGL.

You’ll need Chrome, Firefox 8+, or another browser that supports CORS WebGL textures.

Coded by @peter_nitsch. Inspired by Sol’sTextFX library. Built with @thespite’sGoogle Street View Panorama library, and three.js.

Read about this at Teehan+Lax Labs.

Try it out here

Mapply 

New 3D maps platform hopes to make them more fun - the areas look like a computer game (and I hear that gamification is what will potentially make it differ from it’s competitors).

It is still in early Alpha, and restricted to London UK (and renders in Flash which might cause some instability), but certainly has potential.

You can try out Mapply here

Woodcut Maps 

Service which creates handcrafted wood-inlay displays based on custom Google Maps locations:

Choose a Location

Frame a composition around any special spot in the world, just as if you were taking a photo.

Select Materials

We offer a wide selection of exotic hardwoods, previewable through our online design tool. Each map has a totally unique pattern of wood grain.

Receive Your Map

Two weeks later, a hand-crafted wood-inlay map of your own design arrives at your home for hanging or framing.

You can check out the service and see your choice of area rendered in different woods here

Blocky Earth 

WebGL browser based experimental demo turns Google Maps data into 3D cubic blocks. By Jaume Sánchez:

A representation of terrain, using cubic blocks to render google maps, with texture and elevation.

It shows your current location or a specific location, in different levels of zoom and sizes.

Technology:
WebGL, Fullscreen API, Canvas, Javascript.

Links and other information can be found here

It is also worth checking out Jamie’s other online demos. Also, this was found via roomthily’s interesting tumblr blog, which I can fully recommend.

Streetview Stereographic

Shader Toy + Google Map + Panoramic Explorer

Converts Google Maps Streetview images into interesting panoramic fisheye views. You can experiment with this anywhere there is Streetview data.

Probably the best way to waste your day …

Try it out here

Old 3D Maps Of New York

Codex 99 continues it’s historical look of New York maps with a collection which adds an extra dimension.

Much more can be found here