So here's a question for Tim: can virtual visualization be used as a navigational tool? I'm thinking especially of multi-level urban spaces; we've seen enough science fiction where 3D navigational tools help the hero find his way around the DeathStar™... Is that really practical? And what sort of platform could you do it on? a handheld?

What got me thinking about this more seriously is looking at Harvard Square's website. We've done maps for H2 for a dozen years now (and hopefully that link will take you to some newer web maps soon), and now they are a guinea pig for a new thing, "Everyscape." It's slow, it's kinda clunky in interface, but I can see a lot of potential in this sort of visualization replacing cartography for large-scale mavigation.

But.

It's all still designed on the basis of a landscape. Where I think some sort of 3D is needed is in complex indoor environments. Montreal or Toronto's habitrail environment of street-level, below street-level and above street-level navigation. You can't see beyond whtever corridor you're in, and goodness knows how that corridor relates to the whole. We deal with something similar in Minneapolis (see top image, below, but we mostly only have one level above street, and a second set of lines works graphically OK.

By contrast, St Paul's skyway system moves down a slope, so the skyways at one end of the system are a few stories lower than the ones at the other end. Not that you'd know that from our maps(see bottom image) (or anyone else's).

VR or 3D rendering ought to be able to make basic navigation in these sorts of truly 3-dimensional urban spaces work, but I haven't seen a system really do that properly yet. Tim?
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Playing carto

A year we've been talking about this? Oy, feels like a few years. Anayway, hopefully we can keep this thing moving along.

The funny thing about the big bro/little bro thing is that professionally Tim's been doing GIS for longer than I've been doing cartography. At least I think that's true. I started in 1991, and I think Tim was doing work with College of the Atlantic a little before that even. Anyway, Tim's always been more of a computer-head than me. To me, making maps is so satisfying because it combines the cubby-holing of facts (I probably would have become a librarian in another life) with making pictures (I was a studio arts major in college).

What Tim says about the relationship between maps and play-spaces I think makes a lot of sense. We talk in the map world about the "mapping instinct," but little kids don't really map. They don't even really draw. But they do have a pretty much universal scalar experience, and that is doll-play (OK, OK, action figure play. sheesh). And as Tim says, while 2D mapping is a pretty good substitute most of the time, it's in virtual reality that the possibilities of imitating that play really open up. That would be "gaming," as I believe it is known.

One question that really interested me when I started making maps, was whether maps could be independent works of fiction. Now of course there are fictional maps, but in general they illustrate an existing work of fiction (Tolkien's maps being the common favorite example. I prefer Shepard's endpaper maps for the Pooh books). No map can be an independent work of fiction in the way a piece of prose or a painting or a film can be.

But maps in the real world aren't independent either; they always refer to a place, and in general are made to be used. And there are maps that are used in exactly the same way only fictionally, and those are the maps for gamers: gamers are essentially enacting a fiction, and the map is the fictional tool that guides that play.

Oh well, I thought it was pretty neat when I realized that.

Inspiration

Well well well...we've been thinking about this for a long time and talking for about a year. All good things in time.

Hard to say exactly how a life of "geo" emerged in my career. However I certainly credit the influences of my big brother who has done so much in 4 decades to lead by example and inspire as only one can in that position. For that I'll be eternally grateful. Was it the walls, drawers, and boxes full of national geographic magazines? The stamps, old and new, piling up from every knowable nation long before the Internet and Google Earth could ever take us there? Will probably share some of these and more retrospective tales here as we go, but all in all delighted to have a little discourse about what motivates and keeps the enjoyment of this earthly occupation going.

On the heals of a decade of widely varying GIS adventures mostly traversed in ArcLand, the portrayal of the world in 3D scenes rather than cartography has captured my attention. 25 years ago on the TRS-80 screens it was near impossible to create much in 3D outside drop shadows on bar charts, but not long after I fell in love with building TINs and mesh overlays of mountain ranges in ArcInfo 6.0. Something about creating them touched something not unlike the elaborate model railroad layouts that overran my bedroom and basement for years. But it was decades before the digital technologies have advanced to a useful state.

Surely there is something shared (and nearly universal) in creating fantasy worlds from toys, video games, paints and crafts, and any kind of tangible media imaginable. How does this hardwired desire then intersect with the science or measurement and instrumentation, factual documentation and analytical processing? These fundamentals tug at my reasoning.

Start 'er up

Tim and I have been talking about doing this for a while. I work for Hedberg Maps, a small map publishing company in Minneapolis I helped start in 1991 or 1994 (depending on how you count it). Tim works for ParsonsBrinckerhoff, the world-wide engineering firm. I think of myself as a cartographer, Tim was a GIS guy for a long time--Tim, what do you call yourself these days? Anyway, we figured it would be interesting to compare notes and ideas about the geovisualization world. I already have a blog at http://maphead.blogspot.com, which is an occasional spot to throw out ideas about the nature of maps. Tim, over to you... what should we talk about first?