I had a fantastic snowy walk today…
Archive for the 'Mountains' Category
One of my favourite trips in Innsbruck is a trip on the Stubaitalbahn. This is a tram that winds it way out of Innsbruck and into the alpine Stubaital valley and is also a great way of getting into the mountains for some fantastic walking. It is quite intriguing how the tram winds its way around the mountainsides to make it up to the village of Fulpmes. So I thought it would be interesting to create a VE mashup to see the route on a map and most importantly in 3D.
Although it looks good in 2D:
It only really comes to life when you switch to the 3D view:
So how did I make this?
Well I used MapCruncher. MapCruncher is a great free Microsoft tool to take a map image, georectify it and then chop into automatically into tiles which match the Virtual Earth tile specification. It then generates a sample mashup application for you which you can easily modify to you needs.
Essentially I found a map of the line here and imported it into MapCruncher. I then had to match points that correspond on your map and the Virtual Earth mapping. I this case I set about 20 points along the track, at the edge of bends or stations:
Next I set the white areas of the map image as transparent. Then all I had to do is render the tiles using the renderer:
Simple!
For more help there are resources on the MapCruncher site and this video gives a good overview.
Now I only need to get some photosynths done of the trams and I’m a fully fledged tram-spotter….
The Telegraph newspaper has a good story suggesting traditional map reading is a dying skill due to the increasing use of web mapping and sat navs. I was impressed with how well researched it was.
I spend a lot of time walking in the mountains and still feel that paper maps and magnetic compass are still the best ‘interface’ for hiking (and I have shunned GPS so far). OK so call me a Luddite… But, navigation in urban areas is a different story where I want to use more current technologies as the environment changes faster and I want to search rich data. For example an Ordnance Survey Landranger map is not much use for finding deep crust pizza in London, but a mapping client on my mobile is. So perhaps we are entering a new urban/rural divide with new mapping/navigation technologies?
But web mapping can still cover traditional cartography too. What this story (and the similar bbc story) missed, was the fact that you can access ‘traditional’ cartography on Web Mapping. For example on multimap.com you can use Ordnance Survey mapping (see this example) and Bartholomew’s mapping (see). These will show: “…landmarks such as the Science Museum, Royal Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum, which could not be found on Google Maps.”
It also worth looking at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7587415.stm for a good debate on this where Adrian Miles puts up a spirited defence of web mapping (and even touches on the Free Our Data debate!)
Update
A good forum debate on the BBC site has started here
Ed Parsons has leapt to the defence of web mapping against those old school cartographers here.
Diese Woche bin ich hier:
Mit diesem Blick von meinem Schreibtisch:
OK well I was always a rather late developer. For example I was one of ones that waited a while before doing that learning to walk thing. My excuse has always been that there is no point doing something new until you need it. Why walk when crawling was getting me where I needed to go?
Well perhaps it is the same with blogging, a late starter again… Well I’ve always put it off as I wanted to make sure I had enough useful stuff to blog about consistently. Well I think now is the time, so off we go…
Besides, I now find using my feet quite useful:
- My Feet
Subscribe with RSS
