The Flight Sim Globe / / No Comments Flight Tracker Demo | Source on GitHub Flight Tracker is an impressive Three.js project that simulates global air traffic in real time. While the visualization is currently powered by simulated flight data, the developer has indicated plans to integrate real-time feeds in the future. For now, if you are interested in real-time flight tracking maps you can view Flightradar24 and Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: flight, Globe
Introducing GeoCards – A Wiki Labeled Map / / No Comments GeoCards I’ve seen many ‘vibe-coded’ wiki maps lately. Most follow the same blueprint: they use your location to surface nearby Wikipedia markers. While that works, I wanted a wiki map where the map itself is the gateway. So I built my own wiki map. On GeoCards, every label – from cities and rivers to roads and landmarks – is interactive. Instead of asking ‘What’s near me?’, GeoCards answers Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: GeoCards, Introducing, Labeled, Wiki
Drive Anywhere on Earth / / No Comments Glenn Explore is a 3D open-world driving game that lets you drive a virtual car anywhere on the planet.Back in the early days of the Google Maps API – when we still called digital mapping “neogeography” – there was a massive craze for building driving games on top of real-world maps. Glenn Explore feels like a love letter to those early days of online mapping.Admittedly, the tech here is a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Anywhere, Drive, Earth
Meet Language Explorer: Google’s New Open-Source Linguistic Atlas / / No Comments Google Research’s Language Explorer, is a new interactive map that anyone can use to explore the world’s languages.Mapping the World’s TonguesThe interface of the Language Explorer is built around a highly responsive interactive map. Users can dive into the data in several ways:Spatial Discovery: You can use the map to zoom into a specific region – like the Highlands of Papua New Guinea or the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: atlas, Explorer, Google's, Language, Linguistic, meet, opensource
Subways Built by Slime Mold / / No Comments Subway Sim: Watching a City Think In 2010, researchers in Tokyo ran a slime mold experiment on a map of the city.They placed oat flakes on a map of the Greater Tokyo Area, positioning each flake over a metropolitan center. Then they released a slime mould – Physarum polycephalum – at the location of Tokyo itself.Slime moulds are single-celled organisms with no brain, no nervous system, Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Built, Mold, Slime, Subways
How Big is Big? / / No Comments META is building a massive (AI)-focused data centre in northeast Louisiana. The site footprint is 2,250 acres of land – making the Hyperion Data Center one of the largest data-center construction sites ever attempted in the United States. It is a nearly five-mile-long, one-mile-wide tract of land that is being developed to power Meta’s AI ambitions.It is hard to understand the true scale of a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps
Make a Map Poster / / No Comments Ankur Gupta has created an impressive Map Poster Generator. The code for which is available on GitHub.While the original repository is fantastic for developers, it also requires a local Python setup, terminal commands, and the installation of geospatial libraries like OSMnx and GDAL – which can be intimidating if you aren’t a coder.I’ve therefore adapted the core logic into a Google Colab Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Poster
Did You Win the Global Lottery? / / No Comments Are you feeling lucky? You probably should be. Based on where most Maps Mania readers are located, there’s a good chance you’ve already won the birth lottery.The Birth Lottery map makes global inequality tangible by illustrating how much our quality of life depends on chance. With a single spin, the map randomly “re-births” you somewhere in the world based on real statistics. It poses a simple Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Lottery