10 ms·

Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

919 points by herrherr 11y ago

facorreia 11y ago
A very inspiring story of what can be achieved with talent, determination and resourcefulness. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good. It also makes it very evident how odd it can be to project the surface of a sphere over a flat surface. The distortion of some shapes leaps to the eye.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Cool project. I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't end up using an Open Street Map derivitive. If Google was good enough, then they'd probably find something from Mapbox or others that use OSM data acceptable, and many provide tools so that "the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" wouldn't be true. It's also a bit wierd that the comparison screenshots are all at a different level of zoom from the one's that he wanted to use. Many online maps emphasis different things at different levels.
amelius 11y ago
> I've spent 1,5 years working on this project So wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a huge display then? :)
- pharke 11y ago
  Or a decent high res LED projector, would have cost less than the foam board he stuck the map to and he could have it done in a day.
  - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    Given his objectives specifically included high resolution enough to see details on the map up close, even a 4K projector would have fallen far short of this.
    - cuu508 11y ago
      Yes, for 3mx2m at 300dpi one would need something like 35k projector
      - pharke 11y ago
        Projectors aren't limited to displaying static images, but I guess the format is a matter of taste.
  - rjaco31 11y ago
    He raised the "you cant lean without having your shadow masking everything" problem
- anc84 11y ago
  Nah, a display at that size with comparable resolution will cost a fortune (if it actually is available for mortals). Also power consumption would be quite a sum.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  I would guess that the destination wasn't important, the journey was. But I must agree with others that the author at least seems to give the appearance that he was rather ignorant with different map projections. But if you want an Africa-sized Greenland and a huge huge Kamchatka, why not.
xt 11y ago
Very cool. But I was surprised to see he chose Mercator. See: https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
- zokier 11y ago
  I thought that too, but on the other hand it is not readily apparent where you'd get a good non-mercator map raster.
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    You can just generate one from OpenStreetMaps
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      How would you approach it? Setting up a renderer with global coverage isn't really a trivial task. It is straightforward, and there are reasonable guides, like https://switch2osm.org/ https://switch2osm.org/ , but the planet database is just a big database to work with. (I think I would take advantage of Mapbox's free plan, which allows for 1 custom stylesheet and enough usage to get the image together. I guess there are lots of people who would be happy to render a stylesheet (especially if a modest fee is involved), but I'm not sure how someone on the street figures that out and gets in contact with them)
      - imaginenore 11y ago
        http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering
        maxerickson 11y ago
        Yes, I setup a postgres instance a few weeks ago, so that I could render the local area with nik4.py. Lucky for me I already had mapnik and node installed and working, so getting CartoCSS and nik4.py running wasn't a big deal. I was wondering if you had a specific setup in mind when you said 'just generate', as I did not find the process to be particularly trivial, even for a smaller region (and I do have experience messing around with arcane syntax and command lines).
dietrichepp 11y ago
This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- seqizz 11y ago
  This was also my first reaction. "Nice Africa-sized Greenland you have there.."
  - daigoba66 11y ago
    That is rather striking: http://www.pratham.name/images/mercator.png http://www.pratham.name/images/mercator.png
- fougerejo 11y ago
  Maybe because he used Google Maps, and they use Mercator?
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    By default, but this can be changed in the API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#Projections https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
    - ars 11y ago
      But then you can't stitch images together.
- anc84 11y ago
  I was hoping to see what he learned was projections. Still better than no map on the wall. The style looks lovely at this scale! I would have made my own map from NE and OSM data but not everyone knows how much great data is available for free and how easy making maps with it is. We who know should do a better job of sharing.
kichuku 11y ago
Does anyone know how to achieve this for individual states of India? I would like to have huge maps printed for individual states which shows even the big villages.Is this possible? Or atleast can we do this for big cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi?
- detaro 11y ago
  Look into the openstreetmap based tools mentioned in other comments. They allow to customize a lot about the presentation.
3327 11y ago
I tried 5% of what you did and failed... Basically I would pay for one... I guess this one is saved on the project list backburner. www.kayatilev.com most of my work is furniture. Finishing up a coffee table would love feedback.
- ddingus 11y ago
  This is an awesome project! I get the projection issues. He wants to see the details and be able to roam them. For one who is going to spend a lot of time close up, this project is a home run. Well done, and I'm envious. When I was a kid, I would collect the large size maps Nat Geo would produce. Had a variety of them on the wall, and for reasons very similar to the ones expressed by this guy. It's fun to think about the places in the world, and associate them in various ways. Visits, reading about things, photos, whatever, can all be placed into context and having a big map helps one with a sense of the world and it's many features and people. The pins bother me, but I stuck pins in mine too, and since he can reprint, no worries! I wonder if drawn tungsten or something might serve as a very small diameter pin? Could get a length of it, sharpen the ends, and dip into something to form the heads...
bedatadriven 11y ago
FWIW, a shameless plug for the company where I had my first programming job as a 17 year old: www.marketmaps.com. They will print and ship HUGE maps without a moment's hesitation. Choose a nice world map with a decent projection or send them a PDF and they'll overnight to you :-)
- junto 11y ago
  Oddly, they don't seem to have world maps advertised online. Everything else though!
  - bedatadriven 11y ago
    Try here: http://www.mapsales.com/world-wall-maps.aspx http://www.mapsales.com/world-wall-maps.aspx I think marketmaps.com landing page is pretty focused on the US, but they have a pretty extensive catalog, and you could also design your map with QGIS from OSM data and send them the PDF.
    - chippy 11y ago
      Do you know of any UK / Euro companies that do the same?
- smackfu 11y ago
  Interesting they don't ship paper maps over a certain size, just laminated ones.
Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
"OpenStreetMap... the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" It absolutely wouldn't. Download TileMill or its successor, Mapbox Studio. Adjust the (Carto)CSS. Done. Though for a map of this scale I'd probably work straight from Natural Earth[1] without involving OSM, to be honest. Looks great, anyway. [1] http://www.naturalearthdata.com/ http://www.naturalearthdata.com/
- mankyd 11y ago
  I get the impression he's not just talking about coloring, but also about what labels to show, how to space and lay them out, etc. He mentions this explicitly: > [...] the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job [...]
  - chippy 11y ago
    Google does do a very good job at this for online maps - but as you can see in his photographs, it is absolutely the wrong choice for a wall. Having the ability to change the labelling of a map to suit your needs is cartography and the OpenStreetMap map making toolkit is one of the better ways of achieving this.
  - fro 11y ago
    You can edit all of that with CartoCSS. OP made a great map, but Mapbox Studio really is ideal for a project like this. https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio
    - natural219 11y ago
      It doesn't follow that because CartoCSS/Mapbox studios is "editable", "customizable", and "easy", that the specific combinations of configuration and adjustment available would meet his complex criterion of minimizing time, effort, money, and aesthetics. I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want, and I'm not convinced from the one-off choice it would have been a 100% better idea for the OP to use. It might have been a better choice, and maybe he didn't evaluate the option, but I still imagine the complexity of these options for the OP's specific aesthetic taste is quite large.
Demiurge 11y ago
I wish someone would have recommended him to tweak one of many available OSM styles in TileMill. He also could have exported the layer in any tile shape, projection, and resolution using mapnik. You can even render to vector trivially, which comes in very handy for any printable pdfs. https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers
- relet 11y ago
  The project was started 1,5 years ago at the time of writing the article.
  - Demiurge 11y ago
    I've been using Mapnik for about 8 years now, I think, since it was the first alternative to MapServer. OSM has always been using Mapnik, with mapnik styles in CartoCSS for a long time too (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CartoCSS http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CartoCSS). TileMill beta (https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/v0.5.1 https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/v0.5.1) came out 4 years ago. So, I definitely would have made the same recommendation 1.5 years ago. It still came out pretty cool :) Feel free to ask me any gis or web mapping questions as demiurge@irc.freenode.org, I'd love to facilitate more beautiful maps out there.
bluedino 11y ago
It would kill me to stick pins in something that nice looking.
- iak8god 11y ago
  Ugh, that was my first thought when I got to the end too. After all that work and expense, I was hoping he'd installed a ferromagnetic backing and was going to use tiny magnets as markers.
  - lostfocus 11y ago
    Well, once he killed it with his pins, he can print a new one with a different projection.
    - unreal37 11y ago
      Yes, the printing was the easy part. In a few years, when the ink fades, he can print it again and remount on the same surface.
haihaibye 11y ago
Not sure of the resolution but the easiest solution would be wallpaper. Googling "world map wallpaper" returns quite a lot of results, eg: http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contemporary-wallpaper.jpg http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contempora...
- jannes 11y ago
  The picture you linked is clearly a 3D rendering and not an actual photo.
  - haihaibye 11y ago
    Yes it is, it wasn't obvious on my phone... Another one: https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_map_wallpaper_zimmer__00851_zoom.jpg https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_...
zongitsrinzler 11y ago
I used to do this all the time in the military. We would glue together and laminate smaller maps into one big map (That was then used in a control point for real time planning).
- derefr 11y ago
  I was about to say—isn't this sort of thing (fine-granularity topographic surveying/GIS) exactly what the Professional version of Google Earth is for, marketed to governments/militaries/etc.?
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Which is now free, and lets you save images at 4800x4800 pixels, if you adjust your window just right. Not much use for flat projections though
lazyant 11y ago
National Geographic mural map is pretty decent (but yes, it's heavy on borders) http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world-maps/world-mural-map--blue-ocean http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...
- davegardner 11y ago
  The Earth-toned version looks much nicer IMHO http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world-maps/world-mural-map--earth-toned http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...
  - raimondious 11y ago
    Seeing what he ended up with, I don't think he would have been happy with how much of these maps are graphic design, not map.
    - therealdrag0 11y ago
      I think also the lack of smaller cities.
  - lazyant 11y ago
    I thought this one was smaller but it's actually a bit bigger than the one posted. (I have a smaller version of this one, very nice map)
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Be careful the National Geographic online store sell their customer's information to marketers. Source: They did it to me. If you want to opt out you'll have to send a physical letter to a specific address which is only found by clicking "Privacy & Security" then clicking "Privacy Policy" then "complete Privacy Policy" and final in the section called "V. Your Choices" However they note that even sending this letter may do nothing: > Because we plan our communications in advance, it may take several weeks for your request to become effective. If you continue to receive our communications in error after expressing an opt-out preference, please let us know so that we can investigate the situation. And by that "few weeks" they likely have already sent your personal information to "other selected third parties" making the entire exercise pointless. I love how intentionally misleading their "Privacy & Security" page is. And how even if you click "Privacy Policy" you just get a summary page which is equally misleading. You have to go down three layers to find the legitimate policy which sets out all of their scummy practices.
imaginenore 11y ago
Too bad he chose Mercator projection. Gall–Peters or Robinson would be my choice.
mreiland 11y ago
I'm wondering why he has a skull for a bookstop :)
zeristor 11y ago
Why do people feel like they can just edit Antarctica out?
- mrec 11y ago
  At least Antarctica is practically uninhabited. http://worldmapswithout.nz/ http://worldmapswithout.nz/ on the other hand...
- ionforce 11y ago
  Typical anti-Antarctican sentiment! Rise up, ice crystals!
- scott_karana 11y ago
  If using Mercator, you're left with the choice of "absurd surface area consumed" or "trim the nigh-unpopulated lump".
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
  Why not? It's a pretty much uninhabited, massive chunk of land. It's practically the definition of wasted space in a project like this.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
srj 11y ago
"Even when the data quality is great the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job in always showing the right amount of information." I used to work on tile rendering at Google and considerable effort was spent on this. Thank you!
btbuildem 11y ago
Back in the day when Google Maps first came out, I got a bit.. obsessed with it. I wrote a bit of code to download map tiles (they had an interesting, recursive spiral indexing scheme) and stitch them into large images, and printed poster-sized satellite imagery on a 4' plotter I should not have had access to at work. Such beautiful imagery..
hitlin37 11y ago
would be interesting to add 3d depth on it to show mountains height and depths. No idea how that would be done using paper.
- brute 11y ago
  Laminated object manufacturing [1] Results look amazing [2][3] Would probably be quite heavy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_object_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_object_manufacturing [2] http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictures#2 http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictu... [3] http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictures#5 http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictu...
ChrisArchitect 11y ago
a long time ago, like, in the early years of google maps, I used some perl code someone published to pull down the tiles necessary to print off a 16 page map that I could tape together and put on the wall. I think the code was taken down shortly after because of a legal claim. Google obviously doesn't want their service/tiles being used for that....data/imagery owned by them and whatever map data company... Whether you can easily download the tiles or not due to browser caching, doesn't make it legal to use in stuff. But all in all, hats off, fun project/good results
- germanier 11y ago
  Well, the poster is in Germany, so German laws apply and section 53 of the copyright law (which is referred to in the post) clearly states that this is allowed use: > It shall be permissible for a natural person to make single copies of a work for private use on any medium, insofar as they neither directly nor indirectly serve commercial purposes, as long as no obviously unlawfully-produced model or a model which has been unlawfully made available to the public is used for copying. A person authorised to make copies may also cause such copies to be made by another person if no payment is received therefore, or if it involves copies on paper or a similar medium which have been effected by the use of any kind of photomechanical technique or by some other process having similar effects. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html#p0297 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urh...
rcknr 11y ago
Notes about projection choice seem to prevail, which is nerdy. Well, 400 euros for a wall map seems like a lot of money, but what isn't described very well is how the source file was created. It seems like the guy was manually stitching screenshots. God knows how much time did this take. There's little to no hacking in this project. Just the bit where he makes something custom.
- wingerlang 11y ago
  > There's little to no hacking in this project. Just the bit where he makes something custom. Well the whole damn map/project was custom. Seems as the same amount of "hacking" as most posts in this sub, except this was not made inside a computer.
- brazzy 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure the costs were not a running tally, i.e. they need to be added up for a total of over 1140 EUR.
  - rcknr 11y ago
    I was also confused about that. Just assumed he incremented expenses with each step, but I think you're right, since 10 euros for framing doesn't sound legit. At over thousand of material/services cost the whole thing appears to be even less sensible.
chriswarbo 11y ago
It looks really nice, but it seems a shame to me that the ocean appears featureless. If I were printing all that blue ink, I'd want ocean trenches to stand out in the same way that the mountain ranges do :)
kens 11y ago
I can't believe how negative the comments are here, criticizing the projection. I don't really like the term "middlebrow dismissal" but it seems to apply. As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio.
- function_seven 11y ago
  > As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio. :) Yeah! I don't know why the 3D spherical projection gets a free pass when we're talking about mapping.
- bobbles 11y ago
  There's an unbelievable amount of pretentiousness in this thread, it's ridiculous.
  - function_seven 11y ago
    Imagine the roar if he'd used Comic Sans as the typeface for all place names. And made the frame out of re-purposed shipping pallets.
- kragen 11y ago
  I haven’t contributed to those comment threads, but I have found them much more interesting to read than the original article, regardless of the putative quantity of neocortex supporting their authors’ brows.
jkot 11y ago
I printed 4x1.2m night sky panorama for my living room. I worked on Skyview fork (astronomical image stitching library), after some processing I got 5GB JPEG with 60K to 20K resolution. 6 hours of work and 80 euro printing fee.
quinndupont 11y ago
This is so brilliantly reminiscent of Borges' famous fiction: On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
- nemo1618 11y ago
  So was that map the territory, or not?
  - igravious 11y ago
    I guess cuz it's fiction then the answer is no, the map is not the territory. Or come to think of it, maybe yes. Or both. Or neither. I actually have no idea. That's why I hate lit-crit. I do love me some Borges though. Maybe best not to sweat it.
    - pndmnm 11y ago
      Borges is what actually got me interesting in literary criticism -- because of the nature of his output, it's actually possible to read nearly all of his major work (poetry and nonfiction included). This makes reading lit-crit about him infinitely more satisfying. If you're remotely interested, I'd highly recommend "The Narrow Act", "Invisible Work", and particularly "The Mystery To A Solution", though this last one also requires a lot of Poe and even more patience.
  - 11y ago
brotoss 11y ago
Or you can just buy this big ass one from Ikea for 129 bucks: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/ http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/
- stefap2 11y ago
  Doesn't have small villages.
- srj55 11y ago
  Or this one: http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world-maps/world-mural-map--blue-ocean http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...
stefap2 11y ago
Since it was stitched using a number of smaller images printed from Google maps, wouldn't you end up with a bunch of "google-maps" watermarks all over the map?
- maxerickson 11y ago
  The watermark is per screen, so you just have to crop off the watermarks (and account for the cropping as you set the view for each screenshot).
hiby007 11y ago
Just want to know if someone will be interested in such a kick starter project if "someone" was to build this commercially?
- srj55 11y ago
  I'd be interested.
- visakanv 11y ago
  My wife would love it, so I'd buy one.
- tezzer 11y ago
  me too
davidslv 11y ago
amazing work, I always dreamt about having a world map in one of my future house walls, thanks for sharing, I will definitely come back to your article at some point.
vilhelm_s 11y ago
My dad has a more low-tech approach: he buys a bunch of maps from the National Land Survey, cuts away the margins with scissors, and tapes them together with scotch tape. Rather than world maps, he likes large-scale maps of particular locations. It's really very cool to a have that kind of wall-scale high-resolution information display. When I get a more permanent place to live, I'm tempted to do the same thing.
jamesfe 11y ago
I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisingly hard to rip. - I would have chosen a different projection maybe, but only for purely aesthetics, not any scientific reason. If its hanging on a wall in your house because you want it, you have all the license in the world to do whatever. - I can't tell, but did NZ make the cut? - And I may not have used blue for areas in the corners that are not actually water. What a great job though! This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?"
- dettervt 11y ago
  If you look at the very bottom corner of http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC_3256.jpg http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC... it looks like NZ was included, you can just see the Auckland area.
  - cookrn 11y ago
    Yep! NZ is also visible in http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC_3250.jpg http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC...
- dba7dba 11y ago
  "This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?" Ahaha... I am really curious though. What were their responses? Just do it? Or was it like, my wall is 5 meters high, so make maps that will fit that height? What's your take on digital maps in military? I gather printed maps will be around a looong time because tablets just cannot match the usefulness of maps (at least at platoon/company level)? Always amazed to hear from people of such diverse background and experience here and on the internet in general.
derefr 11y ago
This article's throwaway notion of glow-in-the-dark pins has got me thinking about how to make a surface with light-up LED pins that can be stuck in arbitrarily. - You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient. - Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat? - Given a metallic backing, and a regular fridge-magnet-like magnet, is there some way to trade some of the magnetic force the magnet is exerting on the backing for electrical power? Or maybe power a light using the normal force of the backing on the magnet. Either way, this would probably have the side-effect of reducing the coercivity in a regular permanent magnet way faster than otherwise. (You can make the whole backing surface a weak electromagnet, though! I wonder if that's more or less energy-intensive than making an induction mat of that size...) - Maybe ignore conductive power, and try for radio power? RFID-powered LEDs? Crystal-radio-like LEDs? Or even just phosphorous-coated pinheads (not the matchstick kind; the CRT kind) with an infrared lamp or blacklight on the other wall? - Or maybe, if you don't care about the LEDs only lighting up when on the wall, you could just make them "permanently" lit in the same way some exit signs are: put a tiny little bit of something radioactive in there, and then surround that with fluorescent gas in a glass shell. - A chemical solution would be very interesting for its own sake. If there was potentially chemoluminescent fluid in the backplane (which would then have to be a gel/sponge), and the pins could pull it in via capillary action somehow—maybe the heads on the pins could be squeezed, making them effectively into little bulb syringes—then fluid could end up in the pinhead and react with something inside.
- Retric 11y ago
  I would probably go for black light as the cheap / easy solution, but you would need to keep the map clean.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Given a metallic backing, and a regular fridge-magnet-like magnet, is there some way to trade some of the magnetic force the magnet is exerting on the backing for electrical power? You need movement to generate electricity, otherwise it'd be a perpetual machine. An alternative would be to have a "surface of light", ie, a source of light all along one of the walls of the map and passing right over it (not actually illuminating the map); then any object sitting on the map would be illuminated.
faisalkhalid80 11y ago
nice. i love world maps too, i've created a graffiti art series of wall sized world maps. you can check them out here http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/323803 http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/323803
jaytaylor 11y ago
Did he share a link to the map file that he produced? I'm not seeing it, and it would be incredibly generous if he had made this available for others.
- aye 11y ago
  Unfortunately not: http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/#fn4 http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/#fn4
carlob 11y ago
I don't really understand why OP decided to print it and glue it in separate steps. It seems rather expensive rather than finding someone to do all the work. For example these guys would do the job for 142 euros http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/ http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/ I'm not sure they'd ship internationally though (or at all, for an item of that size).
- riccardodv 11y ago
  +1
- aw3c2 11y ago
  Cleaned link: http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid-panels/panels/ http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid-panels/panels/ Please don't use shortened URLs and don't sneak affiliate codes.
  - carlob 11y ago
    There was no affiliate code, the link only contained a bunch of query parameters to match the size and material of OP's map.
thom 11y ago
Clicked through thinking the "what I've learned from it" would contain some rousing geopolitical epiphany. Alas no, stuck some paper on a wall, put some pins in it, cool, cool.
crumpled 11y ago
I love that the small details are preserved; that's gorgeous. But the omission of Antarctica would unsettle me every day until I redid it.
alexqgb 11y ago
So it looks like xkcd isn't always on the money. http://xkcd.com/977/ http://xkcd.com/977/
cwmma 11y ago
another possible map that would have looked fantastic as a big wall map would be stamen watercolor http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor
haberman 11y ago
I am so conflicted about the "pins on a map" practice of marking your travels. On one hand I totally buy the article's explanation: "Putting pins in a map is something I've loved doing for many years. They inspire me and remind me of great experiences." But on the downside, I'd be really afraid that the completionist in me would be motivated to visit exotic places because of the pin I'd be able to add to the map. ie. going to a place just so I could say I've been there. I'm sure I'd never book a trip solely for that reason, but I'd be afraid it would be more of a factor than it should.
- rconti 11y ago
  That actually sounds like a fantastic way and reason to experience the world. It's far better than most systems people use to pick travel spots: speak the language, major capital city I've heard of, etc etc.
nether 11y ago
For more fun, check out this raised relief map of California: http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm (discussed at http://redd.it/34azy8 http://redd.it/34azy8) For a CA transplant who does a lot of driving up and down the state, this map has been fascinating.
Thiz 11y ago
Greenland is fucking huge.
cmstoken 11y ago
Amazing work!
malandrew 11y ago
This is awesome. I've always wanted a massive dymaxion project and never thought of going about it this way. Now I need to figure out how to convert open-street-map tiles into a dymaxion projection, which I can then print and mount on triangular boards. http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web-mapping/ http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web-mapping/ http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-openlayers/ http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-ope... http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/ http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/
alinspired 11y ago
Great project and lots of followup info in the thread - thanks!
pambospalas 11y ago
awesome article!
godgod 11y ago
His mom is going to be royally pissed when she finds out what he did to her wall.
smegel 11y ago
> There is a profession called »plasterer« Maybe it is a German thing, in Australia a plasterer is anyone who installs plaster boards on the interior of houses by nailing them directly to the stud work (the wooden tresses).
mparramon 11y ago
Just found out about www.wallpapered.com, pretty relevant to this article.
andyjdavis 11y ago
This jumped out at me. >I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid. Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really. Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is. Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports. An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia. Travel time => 8 months. My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive. Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started. Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air. After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.
DigitalSea 11y ago
Amazing. I have always been somewhat obsessed with maps since I was a kid. My light up and quite massive globe was one of my most prized possessions when other kids were more concerned with their Gameboy's and lego. A full-scale wall map has always crossed my mind, not making one, but buying one. I did try and find one once and came up empty handed. I am probably in the minority here, but I like the Mercator projection and I think it looks great on a wall in that size (at least North is always up) even if it isn't exactly well-loved by that many.
barbs 11y ago
This is really cool. Thanks for documenting and capturing the meticulous process of creating this, it was an enjoyable read. I'd love to see a really high definition photo that captures both the scale of the map and the amount of detail in it, preferably in a format that makes it easy to zoom around on different locations to see the detail. Not sure how feasible that would be though :).
yuletide666 11y ago
Such a tragedy that he used Mercator for this :(
axus 11y ago
His idea for overlaying the map with a projector reminded me of the giant globe covered in OLED screens, installed in a museum in Japan: https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/tsunagari/geocosmos.html https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/tsunagari/geocosmos.htm...
chrissyb 11y ago
I read through and couldnt help but think of a video about Perter Bellerby i watched a few years back who makes some of the most beautiful globes I've ever seen. https://vimeo.com/103263135 https://vimeo.com/103263135 I really like Domink's project but I would have liked to have seen more diy trial and error. Watching this video of Jimmy Diresta's would have made mounting on a timber french cleat a breeze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65tH4iMbg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65tH4iMbg4
Klasiaster 11y ago
mercator is so ridiculous, why not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
JCordeiro 11y ago
This is a very cool project. Turned out nice!
sebastianconcpt 11y ago
Nice project. BTW the guy also made a trip to Chernobyl and shared some nice pics: http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/ http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/
spronkey 11y ago
www.mapworld.co.nz sells similarly sized wall maps, for those who don't want to go to such hassle :)

919 points by herrherr 11y ago

A very inspiring story of what can be achieved with talent, determination and resourcefulness. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good. It also makes it very evident how odd it can be to project the surface of a sphere over a flat surface. The distortion of some shapes leaps to the eye.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

Cool project. I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't end up using an Open Street Map derivitive. If Google was good enough, then they'd probably find something from Mapbox or others that use OSM data acceptable, and many provide tools so that "the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" wouldn't be true. It's also a bit wierd that the comparison screenshots are all at a different level of zoom from the one's that he wanted to use. Many online maps emphasis different things at different levels.

amelius 11y ago

> I've spent 1,5 years working on this project So wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a huge display then? :)

pharke 11y ago
Or a decent high res LED projector, would have cost less than the foam board he stuck the map to and he could have it done in a day.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  Given his objectives specifically included high resolution enough to see details on the map up close, even a 4K projector would have fallen far short of this.
  - cuu508 11y ago
    Yes, for 3mx2m at 300dpi one would need something like 35k projector
    - pharke 11y ago
      Projectors aren't limited to displaying static images, but I guess the format is a matter of taste.
- rjaco31 11y ago
  He raised the "you cant lean without having your shadow masking everything" problem
anc84 11y ago
Nah, a display at that size with comparable resolution will cost a fortune (if it actually is available for mortals). Also power consumption would be quite a sum.
ptaipale 11y ago
I would guess that the destination wasn't important, the journey was. But I must agree with others that the author at least seems to give the appearance that he was rather ignorant with different map projections. But if you want an Africa-sized Greenland and a huge huge Kamchatka, why not.

xt 11y ago

Very cool. But I was surprised to see he chose Mercator. See: https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/

zokier 11y ago
I thought that too, but on the other hand it is not readily apparent where you'd get a good non-mercator map raster.
- imaginenore 11y ago
  You can just generate one from OpenStreetMaps
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    How would you approach it? Setting up a renderer with global coverage isn't really a trivial task. It is straightforward, and there are reasonable guides, like https://switch2osm.org/ https://switch2osm.org/ , but the planet database is just a big database to work with. (I think I would take advantage of Mapbox's free plan, which allows for 1 custom stylesheet and enough usage to get the image together. I guess there are lots of people who would be happy to render a stylesheet (especially if a modest fee is involved), but I'm not sure how someone on the street figures that out and gets in contact with them)
    - imaginenore 11y ago
      http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering
      - maxerickson 11y ago
        Yes, I setup a postgres instance a few weeks ago, so that I could render the local area with nik4.py. Lucky for me I already had mapnik and node installed and working, so getting CartoCSS and nik4.py running wasn't a big deal. I was wondering if you had a specific setup in mind when you said 'just generate', as I did not find the process to be particularly trivial, even for a smaller region (and I do have experience messing around with arcane syntax and command lines).

dietrichepp 11y ago

This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass?

deleted 11y ago
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seqizz 11y ago
This was also my first reaction. "Nice Africa-sized Greenland you have there.."
- daigoba66 11y ago
  That is rather striking: http://www.pratham.name/images/mercator.png http://www.pratham.name/images/mercator.png
fougerejo 11y ago
Maybe because he used Google Maps, and they use Mercator?
- jpatokal 11y ago
  By default, but this can be changed in the API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#Projections https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
  - ars 11y ago
    But then you can't stitch images together.
anc84 11y ago
I was hoping to see what he learned was projections. Still better than no map on the wall. The style looks lovely at this scale! I would have made my own map from NE and OSM data but not everyone knows how much great data is available for free and how easy making maps with it is. We who know should do a better job of sharing.

kichuku 11y ago

Does anyone know how to achieve this for individual states of India? I would like to have huge maps printed for individual states which shows even the big villages.Is this possible? Or atleast can we do this for big cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi?

detaro 11y ago
Look into the openstreetmap based tools mentioned in other comments. They allow to customize a lot about the presentation.

3327 11y ago

I tried 5% of what you did and failed... Basically I would pay for one... I guess this one is saved on the project list backburner. www.kayatilev.com most of my work is furniture. Finishing up a coffee table would love feedback.

ddingus 11y ago
This is an awesome project! I get the projection issues. He wants to see the details and be able to roam them. For one who is going to spend a lot of time close up, this project is a home run. Well done, and I'm envious. When I was a kid, I would collect the large size maps Nat Geo would produce. Had a variety of them on the wall, and for reasons very similar to the ones expressed by this guy. It's fun to think about the places in the world, and associate them in various ways. Visits, reading about things, photos, whatever, can all be placed into context and having a big map helps one with a sense of the world and it's many features and people. The pins bother me, but I stuck pins in mine too, and since he can reprint, no worries! I wonder if drawn tungsten or something might serve as a very small diameter pin? Could get a length of it, sharpen the ends, and dip into something to form the heads...

bedatadriven 11y ago

FWIW, a shameless plug for the company where I had my first programming job as a 17 year old: www.marketmaps.com. They will print and ship HUGE maps without a moment's hesitation. Choose a nice world map with a decent projection or send them a PDF and they'll overnight to you :-)

junto 11y ago
Oddly, they don't seem to have world maps advertised online. Everything else though!
- bedatadriven 11y ago
  Try here: http://www.mapsales.com/world-wall-maps.aspx http://www.mapsales.com/world-wall-maps.aspx I think marketmaps.com landing page is pretty focused on the US, but they have a pretty extensive catalog, and you could also design your map with QGIS from OSM data and send them the PDF.
  - chippy 11y ago
    Do you know of any UK / Euro companies that do the same?
smackfu 11y ago
Interesting they don't ship paper maps over a certain size, just laminated ones.

Doctor_Fegg 11y ago

"OpenStreetMap... the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" It absolutely wouldn't. Download TileMill or its successor, Mapbox Studio. Adjust the (Carto)CSS. Done. Though for a map of this scale I'd probably work straight from Natural Earth[1] without involving OSM, to be honest. Looks great, anyway. [1] http://www.naturalearthdata.com/ http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

mankyd 11y ago
I get the impression he's not just talking about coloring, but also about what labels to show, how to space and lay them out, etc. He mentions this explicitly: > [...] the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job [...]
- chippy 11y ago
  Google does do a very good job at this for online maps - but as you can see in his photographs, it is absolutely the wrong choice for a wall. Having the ability to change the labelling of a map to suit your needs is cartography and the OpenStreetMap map making toolkit is one of the better ways of achieving this.
- fro 11y ago
  You can edit all of that with CartoCSS. OP made a great map, but Mapbox Studio really is ideal for a project like this. https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio
  - natural219 11y ago
    It doesn't follow that because CartoCSS/Mapbox studios is "editable", "customizable", and "easy", that the specific combinations of configuration and adjustment available would meet his complex criterion of minimizing time, effort, money, and aesthetics. I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want, and I'm not convinced from the one-off choice it would have been a 100% better idea for the OP to use. It might have been a better choice, and maybe he didn't evaluate the option, but I still imagine the complexity of these options for the OP's specific aesthetic taste is quite large.

Demiurge 11y ago

I wish someone would have recommended him to tweak one of many available OSM styles in TileMill. He also could have exported the layer in any tile shape, projection, and resolution using mapnik. You can even render to vector trivially, which comes in very handy for any printable pdfs. https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers

relet 11y ago
The project was started 1,5 years ago at the time of writing the article.
- Demiurge 11y ago
  I've been using Mapnik for about 8 years now, I think, since it was the first alternative to MapServer. OSM has always been using Mapnik, with mapnik styles in CartoCSS for a long time too (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CartoCSS http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CartoCSS). TileMill beta (https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/v0.5.1 https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/v0.5.1) came out 4 years ago. So, I definitely would have made the same recommendation 1.5 years ago. It still came out pretty cool :) Feel free to ask me any gis or web mapping questions as demiurge@irc.freenode.org, I'd love to facilitate more beautiful maps out there.

bluedino 11y ago

It would kill me to stick pins in something that nice looking.

iak8god 11y ago
Ugh, that was my first thought when I got to the end too. After all that work and expense, I was hoping he'd installed a ferromagnetic backing and was going to use tiny magnets as markers.
- lostfocus 11y ago
  Well, once he killed it with his pins, he can print a new one with a different projection.
  - unreal37 11y ago
    Yes, the printing was the easy part. In a few years, when the ink fades, he can print it again and remount on the same surface.

haihaibye 11y ago

Not sure of the resolution but the easiest solution would be wallpaper. Googling "world map wallpaper" returns quite a lot of results, eg: http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contemporary-wallpaper.jpg http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contempora...

jannes 11y ago
The picture you linked is clearly a 3D rendering and not an actual photo.
- haihaibye 11y ago
  Yes it is, it wasn't obvious on my phone... Another one: https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_map_wallpaper_zimmer__00851_zoom.jpg https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_...

zongitsrinzler 11y ago

I used to do this all the time in the military. We would glue together and laminate smaller maps into one big map (That was then used in a control point for real time planning).

derefr 11y ago
I was about to say—isn't this sort of thing (fine-granularity topographic surveying/GIS) exactly what the Professional version of Google Earth is for, marketed to governments/militaries/etc.?
- mavhc 11y ago
  Which is now free, and lets you save images at 4800x4800 pixels, if you adjust your window just right. Not much use for flat projections though

lazyant 11y ago

National Geographic mural map is pretty decent (but yes, it's heavy on borders) http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world-maps/world-mural-map--blue-ocean http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...

davegardner 11y ago
The Earth-toned version looks much nicer IMHO http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world-maps/world-mural-map--earth-toned http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...
- raimondious 11y ago
  Seeing what he ended up with, I don't think he would have been happy with how much of these maps are graphic design, not map.
  - therealdrag0 11y ago
    I think also the lack of smaller cities.
- lazyant 11y ago
  I thought this one was smaller but it's actually a bit bigger than the one posted. (I have a smaller version of this one, very nice map)
Someone1234 11y ago
Be careful the National Geographic online store sell their customer's information to marketers. Source: They did it to me. If you want to opt out you'll have to send a physical letter to a specific address which is only found by clicking "Privacy & Security" then clicking "Privacy Policy" then "complete Privacy Policy" and final in the section called "V. Your Choices" However they note that even sending this letter may do nothing: > Because we plan our communications in advance, it may take several weeks for your request to become effective. If you continue to receive our communications in error after expressing an opt-out preference, please let us know so that we can investigate the situation. And by that "few weeks" they likely have already sent your personal information to "other selected third parties" making the entire exercise pointless. I love how intentionally misleading their "Privacy & Security" page is. And how even if you click "Privacy Policy" you just get a summary page which is equally misleading. You have to go down three layers to find the legitimate policy which sets out all of their scummy practices.

imaginenore 11y ago

Too bad he chose Mercator projection. Gall–Peters or Robinson would be my choice.

mreiland 11y ago

I'm wondering why he has a skull for a bookstop :)

zeristor 11y ago

Why do people feel like they can just edit Antarctica out?

mrec 11y ago
At least Antarctica is practically uninhabited. http://worldmapswithout.nz/ http://worldmapswithout.nz/ on the other hand...
ionforce 11y ago
Typical anti-Antarctican sentiment! Rise up, ice crystals!
scott_karana 11y ago
If using Mercator, you're left with the choice of "absurd surface area consumed" or "trim the nigh-unpopulated lump".
mynameisvlad 11y ago
Why not? It's a pretty much uninhabited, massive chunk of land. It's practically the definition of wasted space in a project like this.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

srj 11y ago

"Even when the data quality is great the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job in always showing the right amount of information." I used to work on tile rendering at Google and considerable effort was spent on this. Thank you!

btbuildem 11y ago

Back in the day when Google Maps first came out, I got a bit.. obsessed with it. I wrote a bit of code to download map tiles (they had an interesting, recursive spiral indexing scheme) and stitch them into large images, and printed poster-sized satellite imagery on a 4' plotter I should not have had access to at work. Such beautiful imagery..

hitlin37 11y ago

would be interesting to add 3d depth on it to show mountains height and depths. No idea how that would be done using paper.

brute 11y ago
Laminated object manufacturing [1] Results look amazing [2][3] Would probably be quite heavy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_object_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_object_manufacturing [2] http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictures#2 http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictu... [3] http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictures#5 http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris-paper-3d-printer/32903/pictu...

ChrisArchitect 11y ago

a long time ago, like, in the early years of google maps, I used some perl code someone published to pull down the tiles necessary to print off a 16 page map that I could tape together and put on the wall. I think the code was taken down shortly after because of a legal claim. Google obviously doesn't want their service/tiles being used for that....data/imagery owned by them and whatever map data company... Whether you can easily download the tiles or not due to browser caching, doesn't make it legal to use in stuff. But all in all, hats off, fun project/good results

germanier 11y ago
Well, the poster is in Germany, so German laws apply and section 53 of the copyright law (which is referred to in the post) clearly states that this is allowed use: > It shall be permissible for a natural person to make single copies of a work for private use on any medium, insofar as they neither directly nor indirectly serve commercial purposes, as long as no obviously unlawfully-produced model or a model which has been unlawfully made available to the public is used for copying. A person authorised to make copies may also cause such copies to be made by another person if no payment is received therefore, or if it involves copies on paper or a similar medium which have been effected by the use of any kind of photomechanical technique or by some other process having similar effects. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html#p0297 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urh...

rcknr 11y ago

Notes about projection choice seem to prevail, which is nerdy. Well, 400 euros for a wall map seems like a lot of money, but what isn't described very well is how the source file was created. It seems like the guy was manually stitching screenshots. God knows how much time did this take. There's little to no hacking in this project. Just the bit where he makes something custom.

wingerlang 11y ago
> There's little to no hacking in this project. Just the bit where he makes something custom. Well the whole damn map/project was custom. Seems as the same amount of "hacking" as most posts in this sub, except this was not made inside a computer.
brazzy 11y ago
I'm pretty sure the costs were not a running tally, i.e. they need to be added up for a total of over 1140 EUR.
- rcknr 11y ago
  I was also confused about that. Just assumed he incremented expenses with each step, but I think you're right, since 10 euros for framing doesn't sound legit. At over thousand of material/services cost the whole thing appears to be even less sensible.

chriswarbo 11y ago

It looks really nice, but it seems a shame to me that the ocean appears featureless. If I were printing all that blue ink, I'd want ocean trenches to stand out in the same way that the mountain ranges do :)

kens 11y ago

I can't believe how negative the comments are here, criticizing the projection. I don't really like the term "middlebrow dismissal" but it seems to apply. As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio.

function_seven 11y ago
> As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio. :) Yeah! I don't know why the 3D spherical projection gets a free pass when we're talking about mapping.
bobbles 11y ago
There's an unbelievable amount of pretentiousness in this thread, it's ridiculous.
- function_seven 11y ago
  Imagine the roar if he'd used Comic Sans as the typeface for all place names. And made the frame out of re-purposed shipping pallets.
kragen 11y ago
I haven’t contributed to those comment threads, but I have found them much more interesting to read than the original article, regardless of the putative quantity of neocortex supporting their authors’ brows.

jkot 11y ago

I printed 4x1.2m night sky panorama for my living room. I worked on Skyview fork (astronomical image stitching library), after some processing I got 5GB JPEG with 60K to 20K resolution. 6 hours of work and 80 euro printing fee.

quinndupont 11y ago

This is so brilliantly reminiscent of Borges' famous fiction: On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

nemo1618 11y ago
So was that map the territory, or not?
- igravious 11y ago
  I guess cuz it's fiction then the answer is no, the map is not the territory. Or come to think of it, maybe yes. Or both. Or neither. I actually have no idea. That's why I hate lit-crit. I do love me some Borges though. Maybe best not to sweat it.
  - pndmnm 11y ago
    Borges is what actually got me interesting in literary criticism -- because of the nature of his output, it's actually possible to read nearly all of his major work (poetry and nonfiction included). This makes reading lit-crit about him infinitely more satisfying. If you're remotely interested, I'd highly recommend "The Narrow Act", "Invisible Work", and particularly "The Mystery To A Solution", though this last one also requires a lot of Poe and even more patience.
- 11y ago

brotoss 11y ago

Or you can just buy this big ass one from Ikea for 129 bucks: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/ http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/

stefap2 11y ago
Doesn't have small villages.
srj55 11y ago
Or this one: http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world-maps/world-mural-map--blue-ocean http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...

stefap2 11y ago

Since it was stitched using a number of smaller images printed from Google maps, wouldn't you end up with a bunch of "google-maps" watermarks all over the map?

maxerickson 11y ago
The watermark is per screen, so you just have to crop off the watermarks (and account for the cropping as you set the view for each screenshot).

hiby007 11y ago

Just want to know if someone will be interested in such a kick starter project if "someone" was to build this commercially?

srj55 11y ago
I'd be interested.
visakanv 11y ago
My wife would love it, so I'd buy one.
tezzer 11y ago
me too

davidslv 11y ago

amazing work, I always dreamt about having a world map in one of my future house walls, thanks for sharing, I will definitely come back to your article at some point.

vilhelm_s 11y ago

My dad has a more low-tech approach: he buys a bunch of maps from the National Land Survey, cuts away the margins with scissors, and tapes them together with scotch tape. Rather than world maps, he likes large-scale maps of particular locations. It's really very cool to a have that kind of wall-scale high-resolution information display. When I get a more permanent place to live, I'm tempted to do the same thing.

jamesfe 11y ago

I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisingly hard to rip. - I would have chosen a different projection maybe, but only for purely aesthetics, not any scientific reason. If its hanging on a wall in your house because you want it, you have all the license in the world to do whatever. - I can't tell, but did NZ make the cut? - And I may not have used blue for areas in the corners that are not actually water. What a great job though! This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?"

dettervt 11y ago
If you look at the very bottom corner of http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC_3256.jpg http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC... it looks like NZ was included, you can just see the Auckland area.
- cookrn 11y ago
  Yep! NZ is also visible in http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC_3250.jpg http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC...
dba7dba 11y ago
"This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?" Ahaha... I am really curious though. What were their responses? Just do it? Or was it like, my wall is 5 meters high, so make maps that will fit that height? What's your take on digital maps in military? I gather printed maps will be around a looong time because tablets just cannot match the usefulness of maps (at least at platoon/company level)? Always amazed to hear from people of such diverse background and experience here and on the internet in general.

derefr 11y ago

This article's throwaway notion of glow-in-the-dark pins has got me thinking about how to make a surface with light-up LED pins that can be stuck in arbitrarily. - You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient. - Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat? - Given a metallic backing, and a regular fridge-magnet-like magnet, is there some way to trade some of the magnetic force the magnet is exerting on the backing for electrical power? Or maybe power a light using the normal force of the backing on the magnet. Either way, this would probably have the side-effect of reducing the coercivity in a regular permanent magnet way faster than otherwise. (You can make the whole backing surface a weak electromagnet, though! I wonder if that's more or less energy-intensive than making an induction mat of that size...) - Maybe ignore conductive power, and try for radio power? RFID-powered LEDs? Crystal-radio-like LEDs? Or even just phosphorous-coated pinheads (not the matchstick kind; the CRT kind) with an infrared lamp or blacklight on the other wall? - Or maybe, if you don't care about the LEDs only lighting up when on the wall, you could just make them "permanently" lit in the same way some exit signs are: put a tiny little bit of something radioactive in there, and then surround that with fluorescent gas in a glass shell. - A chemical solution would be very interesting for its own sake. If there was potentially chemoluminescent fluid in the backplane (which would then have to be a gel/sponge), and the pins could pull it in via capillary action somehow—maybe the heads on the pins could be squeezed, making them effectively into little bulb syringes—then fluid could end up in the pinhead and react with something inside.

Retric 11y ago
I would probably go for black light as the cheap / easy solution, but you would need to keep the map clean.
icebraining 11y ago
Given a metallic backing, and a regular fridge-magnet-like magnet, is there some way to trade some of the magnetic force the magnet is exerting on the backing for electrical power? You need movement to generate electricity, otherwise it'd be a perpetual machine. An alternative would be to have a "surface of light", ie, a source of light all along one of the walls of the map and passing right over it (not actually illuminating the map); then any object sitting on the map would be illuminated.

faisalkhalid80 11y ago

nice. i love world maps too, i've created a graffiti art series of wall sized world maps. you can check them out here http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/323803 http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/323803

jaytaylor 11y ago

Did he share a link to the map file that he produced? I'm not seeing it, and it would be incredibly generous if he had made this available for others.

aye 11y ago
Unfortunately not: http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/#fn4 http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/#fn4

carlob 11y ago

I don't really understand why OP decided to print it and glue it in separate steps. It seems rather expensive rather than finding someone to do all the work. For example these guys would do the job for 142 euros http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/ http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/ I'm not sure they'd ship internationally though (or at all, for an item of that size).

riccardodv 11y ago
+1
aw3c2 11y ago
Cleaned link: http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid-panels/panels/ http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid-panels/panels/ Please don't use shortened URLs and don't sneak affiliate codes.
- carlob 11y ago
  There was no affiliate code, the link only contained a bunch of query parameters to match the size and material of OP's map.

thom 11y ago

Clicked through thinking the "what I've learned from it" would contain some rousing geopolitical epiphany. Alas no, stuck some paper on a wall, put some pins in it, cool, cool.

crumpled 11y ago

I love that the small details are preserved; that's gorgeous. But the omission of Antarctica would unsettle me every day until I redid it.

alexqgb 11y ago

So it looks like xkcd isn't always on the money. http://xkcd.com/977/ http://xkcd.com/977/

cwmma 11y ago

another possible map that would have looked fantastic as a big wall map would be stamen watercolor http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor

haberman 11y ago

I am so conflicted about the "pins on a map" practice of marking your travels. On one hand I totally buy the article's explanation: "Putting pins in a map is something I've loved doing for many years. They inspire me and remind me of great experiences." But on the downside, I'd be really afraid that the completionist in me would be motivated to visit exotic places because of the pin I'd be able to add to the map. ie. going to a place just so I could say I've been there. I'm sure I'd never book a trip solely for that reason, but I'd be afraid it would be more of a factor than it should.

rconti 11y ago
That actually sounds like a fantastic way and reason to experience the world. It's far better than most systems people use to pick travel spots: speak the language, major capital city I've heard of, etc etc.

nether 11y ago

For more fun, check out this raised relief map of California: http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm (discussed at http://redd.it/34azy8 http://redd.it/34azy8) For a CA transplant who does a lot of driving up and down the state, this map has been fascinating.

Thiz 11y ago

Greenland is fucking huge.

cmstoken 11y ago

Amazing work!

malandrew 11y ago

This is awesome. I've always wanted a massive dymaxion project and never thought of going about it this way. Now I need to figure out how to convert open-street-map tiles into a dymaxion projection, which I can then print and mount on triangular boards. http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web-mapping/ http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web-mapping/ http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-openlayers/ http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-ope... http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/ http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/

alinspired 11y ago

Great project and lots of followup info in the thread - thanks!

pambospalas 11y ago

awesome article!

godgod 11y ago

His mom is going to be royally pissed when she finds out what he did to her wall.

smegel 11y ago

> There is a profession called »plasterer« Maybe it is a German thing, in Australia a plasterer is anyone who installs plaster boards on the interior of houses by nailing them directly to the stud work (the wooden tresses).

mparramon 11y ago

Just found out about www.wallpapered.com, pretty relevant to this article.

andyjdavis 11y ago

This jumped out at me. >I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid. Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really. Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is. Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports. An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia. Travel time => 8 months. My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive. Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started. Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air. After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.

DigitalSea 11y ago

Amazing. I have always been somewhat obsessed with maps since I was a kid. My light up and quite massive globe was one of my most prized possessions when other kids were more concerned with their Gameboy's and lego. A full-scale wall map has always crossed my mind, not making one, but buying one. I did try and find one once and came up empty handed. I am probably in the minority here, but I like the Mercator projection and I think it looks great on a wall in that size (at least North is always up) even if it isn't exactly well-loved by that many.

barbs 11y ago

This is really cool. Thanks for documenting and capturing the meticulous process of creating this, it was an enjoyable read. I'd love to see a really high definition photo that captures both the scale of the map and the amount of detail in it, preferably in a format that makes it easy to zoom around on different locations to see the detail. Not sure how feasible that would be though :).

yuletide666 11y ago

Such a tragedy that he used Mercator for this :(

axus 11y ago

His idea for overlaying the map with a projector reminded me of the giant globe covered in OLED screens, installed in a museum in Japan: https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/tsunagari/geocosmos.html https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/tsunagari/geocosmos.htm...

chrissyb 11y ago

I read through and couldnt help but think of a video about Perter Bellerby i watched a few years back who makes some of the most beautiful globes I've ever seen. https://vimeo.com/103263135 https://vimeo.com/103263135 I really like Domink's project but I would have liked to have seen more diy trial and error. Watching this video of Jimmy Diresta's would have made mounting on a timber french cleat a breeze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65tH4iMbg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65tH4iMbg4

Klasiaster 11y ago

mercator is so ridiculous, why not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection

JCordeiro 11y ago

This is a very cool project. Turned out nice!

sebastianconcpt 11y ago

Nice project. BTW the guy also made a trip to Chernobyl and shared some nice pics: http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/ http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/

spronkey 11y ago

www.mapworld.co.nz sells similarly sized wall maps, for those who don't want to go to such hassle :)