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1 Source: Let s say I m shopping for a new apartment in center city, Philadelphia. I don t know about you, but the right apartment for me is always about the small details, details that aren t going to make the craigslist post. For example, I d like to know: Can I watch the sunset from anywhere in the apartment? I bike a lot -- is the terrain around the building smooth and suitable for riding? Is there enough room for me to hang a flowerbox outside my bedroom window? These are all pretty complicated spatial questions. I m lucky enough to live in Philly, so I could go to the apartment I m looking at and determine the answers to these questions for myself. But what if I didn t live in philly? In the past, my research options would be limited to go there, or phone a friend to check for me. I m very pleased to say that with the advent of current geospatial technology, this is no longer the case. We now have the visualization tools to capture all the information I just mentioned (and more) and share it from a web browser anywhere in the world. Today, I m here to tell you about modern maps. 1

2 Source: e_1.7m_whitespace_removed.jpg So when I say map, what do you picture? A lot of you might picture something like this, 2

3 Source: We ve come a long, long way since the days of paper maps and atlases. I would argue that the next big step forward was putting maps on the web,making spatial information accessible from anywhere. Then, through concerted data-acquisition efforts, we also moved from just illustrations and symbolic representations of our environment to images. High resolution imagery covering most of the world. 3

4 Source: In 2010, there was another TED talk about the next breakthrough in online map technology. A speaker from the Bing maps team gave a demo of something like this. Not just flat images anymore, but images mapped around the camera on a box or a sphere, to give the illusion of a 3D environment. Sort of like the Truman show. 4

5 Source: Cesium Well, it s been 7 years since then and I m pleased to say the geospatial and graphics communities have been very busy. Nowadays, cutting-edge web map technology looks more like this. What I m showing you now is a full 3D map, which is something entirely different from that street view example. This is modern cartography, the latest in mapping and visualization technology and it s going to change the way we interact with the world. 5

6 I keep emphasizing the 3D data. But is 3D such a big deal? Short answer, yes! This is a huge deal. Moving from 2D to 3D is like going from radio to television. We ve become used to 2D maps and static images as the status quo. But 3D isn t just 2D plus one -- there are a lot of information that you can only really capture using 3D data visualization. And even if you can find a way to represent 3D data in 2D, it s often much less intuitive to understand than a 3D visualization. 6

7 Source: Cesium Take for example, this 2D display of satellite movement. This is really weird looking. As you ll see in a moment, these satellites actually have completely sensible orbits, its just hard to see here. The strangeness in this visualization comes from trying to forcibly flatten 3D information into just two dimensions. Why does this satellite seem to speed up and slow down I can tell you that it s actually moving at a mostly constant rate. Well, there s no perfect way to flatten a globe. We have to stretch the poles to do it, hence the apparent speedup. This satellite, why is there a discontinuity in its path? Well the earth is constantly rotating about its axis. By the time it makes a full circuit, the earth has rotated. And it s difficult to even describe what this guy is doing. Let s look at this in 3D. (demo) Suddenly, it makes sense. 7

8 You have probably seen plenty of 3D graphics before. Pixar movies, video games But I want to emphasize that this is special because we can process and display real information about the world, in tremendous volume and with incredible accuracy. After all, we live in a 3D world. We should visualize it in 3D. This is the first time we ve have the data and the technology to bring that 3D map technology to the web, so that anyone can use it and share it. What s more, the development community is working on tools such that anyone, not just cartographers and programmers, can build applications on top of a digital globe. What might you want to build? Well, when we re faced with a ground breaking new piece of technology, one of the common problems is that we initially can t even see its potential applications or scope. Just think about the Internet, or smartphones, technology that most people didn t realize would become such important infrastructure. So to understand the importance of 3D maps, let s look at a few more examples of that harness the power of 3D. 8

9 Source: So 360 video is something that has become hip recently. Sites like Facebook and Youtube now support sharing of 360 video, like this clip of someone s skydiving trip. This is like that Bing Streetside video we were looking at, a projection of images onto a sphere. But imagine if we could use the full 3d visualization techniques we ve been discussing. What if you could share a full 3d scan of an environment, such that your friends could interactively walk through digital recreations of places you ve been. That would be something entirely different. 9

10 Source: Cesium Let s say I m a city planner in Manhattan. I m trying to plan development so that we don t interfere with people s enjoyment of central park. One thing I might worry about is shadowing. How would a proposed skyscraper block sunlight in the surrounding area? Well, if I have an interactive 3D map of Manhattan, like the open source one we were looking at before, we can move the sun in the sky and at a glance see exactly how our buildings will cast shadows at any time of day, any time of year. This is a novel map application that s only possible in 3D. 10

11 Source: Another important 3D map use case is definitely one which we need to explore more: disaster prevention and relief. 3D geospatial information and visualization tools are critical for natural hazard modeling and evacuation planning. Why? Because natural hazards aren t flat. This map here displays earthquake points of origin in 3D. You d better believe that, for example, how far underground an earthquake occurs makes a difference in how we plan for it. The strength of an earthquake s tremors decay as you get further away from its origin, so an quake at 20 km deep is different from one 200 km deep. We can t just treat it like a point on a flat plane. 11

12 I could show you demos of novel 3D map applications all day. There s just so much you can do with this technology! They say a picture s worth 1000 words. How much is a video worth? How about a video where you can control the camera, and filter and layer real information and walk through time? Modern technology is moving us closer and closer to perfect visual simulations of reality. But in some ways, it s already better than reality. We ve unlocked a new dimension in our geospatial visualization technology, and there are so many new applications for it. I can t imagine all the things we ll build with it. 12

13 Now, the first ingredient of a good map is accurate information about our environment: geospatial data. And when I say data, I mean all sorts of information, really anything that can be associated with a specific location in space. This could be information about the natural world, like what s the shape of the Jersey coastline, or about urban environments, like where are all the buildings in Philadelphia. Even Yelpstyle information, like where are all the Chinese restaurants in Philly? More data is usually better of course, but geospatial data in particular is important because it s an information need that we all have in common. No matter who you are or where you live, having detailed, accurate information about the world around you is always useful. The numbers are staggering -- google maps for example, has over a billion users, and that s just one of many map applications. People use geospatial data constantly. Lucky for all of us, we are currently in the midst of a geospatial data renaissance. What I mean by that is right now, we have more geospatial data than we ever have before. A tremendous, mind-boggling amount of data is pouring in every day at an accelerating rate from all over the world. Let me give you an example of the sheer scale we re working with: 13

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15 Source: mapbox.com/blog/worldview-4-launch As we speak, satellites circle the globe taking pictures of every square foot of the Earth s surface. Just one of these satellites can collect up to 7 terapixels worth of images a day. To understand just how much data this is, consider a smartphone. A good smartphone nowadays might have a 7 megapixel camera, about a million pixels. A terapixel is about a million megapixels. That s a million smart phones up in space imaging the earth every day, with every pixel representing about a square foot. If we printed out a terapixel image at 300 dpi (standard), it would be about 7500 m^2, almost 1.5 football fields. And again, this is just one of many imaging satellites out there. 14

16 Source: mapbox.com/blog/worldview-4-launch As we speak, satellites circle the globe taking pictures of every square foot of the Earth s surface. Just one of these satellites can collect up to 7 terapixels worth of images a day. To understand just how much data this is, consider a smartphone. A good smartphone nowadays might have a 7 megapixel camera, about a million pixels. A terapixel is about a million megapixels. That s a million smart phones up in space imaging the earth every day, with every pixel representing about a square foot. If we printed out a terapixel image at standard resolution, it would be almost 1.5 football fields. And again, this is just one of many imaging satellites out there. There are more than 1300 satallites in orbit, around 300 of which are devoted to earth observation, geospatial data acquisition. 15

17 Source: Cesium Now, as if that wasn t enough, we have something even better than images. We have 3D data! This includes data about the shape of the terrain all over the planet at resolutions up to about 0.5 meter. 3D models of entire cities, including buildings and natural landmarks. We have all this 3D data mostly thanks to advances in 3d scanning technology that make capturing hi-resolution 3d data faster and easier than ever before. For example, we have LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It s similar to SONAR, but with light. LIDAR basically scans a 3D space and uses laser pulses to calculate how far away a surface is at many adjacent points. This gives us a high-fidelity approximation of a surface. Fun fact: some autonomous cars use LIDAR. 16

18 Source: Photogrammetry is another important 3D data acquisition technique. Basically, you can fly around some 3D structure, say with a drone, and photograph it from many different angles. You can then find common features in adjacent photographs and use them to stitch the photos into the full 3D recreation of the original surface. And we can get amazingly high-resolution. Now, neither of these techniques are new, but what is new is that the technology has advanced to the point where it cheap enough to used very widely, by organizations of all size. 17

19 This is another important trend in geospatial today -- the reason we have so much data is because we have contributions from every sector! Private companies of course are collecting and organizing data. More and more governments -- at every level, city, state, federal -- are releasing open source geospatial data. For example, the Swiss government is huge proponent of open source geospatial data. They have a geoportal website where they release all sorts of 2D and 3D data, from terrain to street layouts to bus maps to average rainfall with extensive filtering and layering options. The site got around 9 million visitors last year, and that was before 3D -- their 3D beta was just released in January. 18

20 Source: Cesiumjs.org But it s not just governments! Even individuals are joining the geospatial data acquisition game. Many geospatial datasets are open source, meaning Wikipediastyle, anyone can use it, and anyone can contribute. For example, this here is a 3D map of Manhattan containing over 1.1 million building models, made of contributions from many people. All of Manhattan, in 3D. 19

21 So at this point I hope you understand why this is such an exciting time in the world of geospatial -- we have literal mountains of data and we re developing better and better infrastructure for organizing and displaying it. Now what? Well, the next question is how can we make sure this technology is accessible? Because there are so many possible applications of 3D geospatial, and it s information that s relevant to everyone, it s important that anyone be able to use it. We need open standards to allow for a fully interoperable ecosystem. We need as much open source data as possible. We need widely-accessible infrastructure for authoring, sharing and viewing this data. Overall, we need to collaborate at every level of this problem, so that as a global community we can build amazing things. And even though all the issues I just mentioned are really, really hard problems, there s a lot of reason to feel optimistic about the future of this field, because we ve already made such incredible progress. Let me give you a few examples of areas of how the global geospatial and 3D graphics communities are fighting hard technical problems together, and winning. 20

22 Here s a more concrete example, an excellent showcase of what community collaboration has brought us so far. This is a high resolution map of Center City, Philadelphia. This is an incredible visualization tool that we can share with anyone through the web, and it s thanks to a combination of many organizations, and many individuals working together. I want to emphasize that this isn t just a problem for the experts. Something that makes 3D geospatial technology very special is that this is one of the first times a novel communication technology has been widely distributed at the same time as the tools necessary to develop content for it. To return to the television analogy, when TV first became popular, there was no way for ordinary consumers to produce and distribute their own content. That s not the case with 3D geospatial tech. Right now, we re working on ways for you to make applications and experiences straight from your browser. One of the most beautiful things about the web is that it makes it possible for everyone to be not just a consumer, but a creator and a publisher. If you re an engineer we need you to help contribute to our 3d visualization tools as they continues to develop. If you re not an engineer, we still need you. We need you to help collect and curate data. We need you to help imagine novel use cases and 21

23 experiences that can harness the power of these platforms. What I ve shown you is the basis of incredibly important infrastructure. The way it develops will depend on the decisions we make as a community. The geospatial renaissance, 3D cartography is here and will change the way we interact with the world. I hope you ll be a part of it. 21