Grand Theft Auto-Style Car Chase Via Google Maps

Fun little animation from Honest Directors, in which Google Maps hi-res satellite footage of New York is used to create a faux car chase through the streets of Brooklyn. LINK: Youtube

A World Map of Nuclear Explosions

The tumblr blog We Love Data Visualizations has all sorts of fascinating maps and charts. This one lists every nuclear explosion, the setting, the year, and the responsible party. Once you’re at the link, click on the image for a larger view.

Link, Via: Gizmodo, Via: Neatorama

Augmenting Aerial Earth Maps with Dynamic Information

Kihwan Kim, Sangmin Oh, Jeonggyu Lee, and Irfan Essa of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology are introducing methods for augmenting aerial visualizations of Earth (from tools such as Google Earth) with dynamic information obtained from videos.

Their goal is to make Augmented Earth Maps that visualize the live broadcast of dynamic sceneries within a city. They propose different approaches to analyze videos of pedestrians and cars, under differing conditions and then augment Aerial Earth Maps with live and dynamic information. They also analyze natural phenomenon (clouds) and project information from these to the AEMs to add the visual reality. LINK: Presurfer

Vintage Brain Maps

This is fantastic: a series of vintage "brain maps" as created by one Dr. Alesha Sivartha in the late 1800s (published in his metaphysical book The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man).

You don’t have to believe or understand all the New Age-y stuff to appreciate the weirdness of the lithographs: Link. Via: Quiddity, Via: Neatorama

Creative Map Art

“Every day millions of people use maps to take them places. But what about maps as a work of art? Here are a few artists that use maps as their muse. (And I bet they never get lost!) Matthew Cusick is an artist that makes collages out of old maps, atlases and geography textbooks. His work of art contains maps that go nowhere.” w/ photos. LINK