
Google Maps is no longer a flat map - kylesellas
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/03/google-maps-is-no-longer-flatearth/
======
martijn_himself
Google Maps must be one of the modern wonders of the world, it's still nothing
short of breathtaking to zoom out of streetview in crowded London and then
land somewhere on a country crossroads in remote Vietnam.

~~~
cma
Google Earth VR is mindblowing.

~~~
mrep
Holy Shit! I just youtube'd some videos about that and it looks amazing! This
is the first thing that has really made me want to get VR.

Example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCrkZOx5Q1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCrkZOx5Q1M)

------
phyzome
By the way, for anyone who prefers Google Maps to load fast and show actual
satellite/aerial imagery (rather than trying to render each tree as a weird
crumpled blob) there's a flag you can set to get the old, fast 2D mode:

[https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas](https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas)

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Thank you!

I'm actually quite annoyed that Google took away the visible option to
disabled the 3D aerial view. It's such a resource hog, and my work's internet
is often quite slow, and 3D has far more data to retrieve.

~~~
modeless
The option is there. It's in the hamburger menu, labeled "Globe".

------
Bud
"On flat maps, it’s impossible to represent land mass size on a relative
scale."

Um, no it's not. TechCrunch needs better editors. You just need to use a non-
Mercator projection.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection)

~~~
astrodust
You can represent size _or_ shape correctly, not both.

Anyone who uses the Gall-Peters projection is a cop.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Obligatory XKCD

[https://www.xkcd.com/977/](https://www.xkcd.com/977/)

~~~
Ajedi32
Google decided to go with "A Globe".

~~~
deathanatos
At low zoom levels.

Given the behavior of the poles (they're not viewable; the south is also a
black hole…), I suspect that there's a very smoothly done transition to web
mercator for the higher zoom levels.

~~~
gefh
Correct. At high zooms, the trig required in the spherical math becomes
inaccurate, so we fade back to simple web mercator.

~~~
astrodust
Cartography wouldn't be able to use all these cheap tricks if the poles were
habitable territory.

Can you imagine the distortion on a map of a small town located at the pole if
Mercator was used?

------
JorgeGT
The visualization is really cool but for daily use seems more practical being
able to plot long trip routes without them disappearing on the back of the
globe than being able to assess the true size of landmasses:
[https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Madrid/Sydney,+New+South+Wal...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Madrid/Sydney,+New+South+Wales,+Australia/@23.2935702,-5.1637745,3.36z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0xd422997800a3c81:0xc436dec1618c2269!2m2!1d-3.7037902!2d40.4167754!1m5!1m1!1s0x6b129838f39a743f:0x3017d681632a850!2m2!1d151.2092955!2d-33.8688197!3e4)

~~~
bla2
I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure if planning trips to the other side
of the globe qualifies as "daily use" either :-)

I think it's neat to see that the route is along a great circle -- that wasn't
clear at all before this change.

~~~
brandonhorst
Unfortunately, the line drawing doesn't make this as cool as it could be. The
line representing the flight from BOS to PEK is drawn due west, as would look
natural on a 2D map. The real flight (and shortest route) heads north and
passes near the north pole.

Hope they can update this, which would make international flights seem even
more impressive than they already do.

~~~
euyyn
Yeah, ugh.
[https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Boston,+MA/Beijing,+China/@6...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Boston,+MA/Beijing,+China/@63.856184,-159.5021672,2.11z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e3652d0d3d311b:0x787cbf240162e8a0!2m2!1d-71.0588801!2d42.3600825!1m5!1m1!1s0x35f05296e7142cb9:0xb9625620af0fa98a!2m2!1d116.4073963!2d39.9041999!3e4)

------
sigmar
>On flat maps, it’s impossible to represent land mass size on a relative
scale.

This isn't right. It is impossible to represent both relative position and
relative size accurately. Gall-Peters and other equal-area projections
accurately represent relative sizes.

~~~
rspeer
There are cartographically reasonable equal-area or nearly-equal-area
projections. Why are we still talking about Gall-Peters?

Peters was a charlatan who knew very little geography (he didn't even want to
give credit to the geographer who discovered his map), and the Gall-Peters
projection is Mercator for old-school hippies who think they can promote
equality by making Africa taller.

~~~
euyyn
Expand?

~~~
lainga
Yes, but only vertically.

~~~
euyyn
I was trying to ask the parent to expand on the many things he was claiming
lol

~~~
rspeer
Here's a couple views on Peters and his map projection.

An article from "The Map Room" [1] on the argument about Boston public schools
having adopted that map, which really dominates Google results right now I
guess, but even within the lens of that topic it hits the major points.

And here's a "New Internationalist" article about Arno Peters [2] -- it sounds
like he was fine as a historian, and I even agree with his _motivation_ for
not wanting to plot historical events on a Mercator map, but it sure would
have been great if he had learned about the equal-area alternatives to
Mercator that Gall and Mollweide and Eckert and other geographers had already
made.

It's not that I'm against making a map projection to "question Western
imperalism". I take more issue with Peters' questioning of basic geometry --
he claimed his map preserves angles, which is clearly false (imagine a NW-SE
road meeting a NE-SW road in Ecuador and what that right angle would look like
in Gall-Peters), and he claimed that it was the "only" equal-area projection.

And I don't think it actually advances the conversation about equality to make
a map that looks right in Europe and stretches Africa and South America like
taffy.

EDIT: left out the links

[1] [https://www.maproomblog.com/2017/03/the-peters-map-is-
fighti...](https://www.maproomblog.com/2017/03/the-peters-map-is-fighting-the-
last-war/)

[2]
[https://newint.org/features/2003/01/05/arno/](https://newint.org/features/2003/01/05/arno/)

------
dougmwne
I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop
looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a
little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of
Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users
"below" the equator.

~~~
nailer
Australian maps are shown with Oz in the middle, and the pacific / indian
oceas each side, with South East Asia and Antarctia surrounding, exactly the
same way US maps put the US in the center.

~~~
Renevith
Do you mean whole-world maps have Australia in the center? (I assume so, since
obviously a map of only Australia would have Australia as the center...)

That's fascinating! I grew up in the US and I'm not sure I've ever used a
world map with the US in the center. Curious where you got this impression. I
can find some examples if I specifically search online, but they look very
weird to me.

Every world map I grew up with has the US on the far left, presumably due to
the convenience of splitting the map on the Pacific Ocean. The first example
that came to my mind:
[https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg)

~~~
kalleboo
Maps in Japan have Japan and the Pacific ocean in the center and the Americas
off to the right. Which make the phrases "the west" and "the east" kind of
interesting choices.

Example of a map poster for kids: [http://happylilac.net/sekaitizu-
mihon.gif](http://happylilac.net/sekaitizu-mihon.gif)

------
barryp
Very cool. However it's not using great circle routes for airline directions,
for example ask to go from Calgary to London. It should go well over
Greenland, but instead just follows the same path you'd get from drawing a
line on a Mercator map.

~~~
mjg59
Eastbound flights often take non-great circle routes in order to make better
use of the jetstream - depending on the forecast, a straight eastward line may
be more accurate than a great circle.

------
Nala_Alan
It even allows you to see satelite pictures of other planets! I'm not sure how
old is that feature, but it's awesome.

You just have to unzoom far away from earth and it'll show you a menu where
you can choose where you want to go.

[https://www.google.com/maps/space/mercury/@47.5337211,-157.4...](https://www.google.com/maps/space/mercury/@47.5337211,-157.4592368,22671583m/data=!3m1!1e3)

~~~
krotton
And interior of the ISS :). Thanks, that was a fantastic journey!

------
nojvek
While I was working on the PowerBI globe map visualization
[https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-
awesomeness-...](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-awesomeness-
unlocked-the-globe-map/) (video in link)

I had to do some funky magic to stitch square tiles in a sphere from bing maps
and do reverse mercerator projection. I had to also ensure GPS coordinates
would exactly align to the right pixel otherwise the 3D chart would all look
weird. So there was a lot of fun math involved over a bunch of evenings and
weekends.

The hard part though, was to do an animation that would unravel a spherical
earth into a flat earth and vice versa.

Naive me though it would be a simple linear interpolation that would take a
couple of minutes but it ended up being many many nights of crazy mathematics
to get it right.

Map projections are really interesting. Much respect to their inventors.

~~~
kccqzy
I'm interested in learning more! I imagined linear interpolation could work
too. What went wrong?

~~~
nojvek
This does a hemisphere but doesn’t map lng and lat. Gives an example of the
kind of maths involved.
[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1334241/interpolate...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1334241/interpolate-
between-3d-plane-and-3d-hemisphere)

It’s not a simple linear x0, y0, z0 -> x1, y1, z1 because you kind of want an
animation like a square blanket is wrapping around a ball, stretching the
right amount in different places such that it becomes a sphere.

I tried to find a single magical equation that would give a x0, y0, 0 -> x1,
y1, z1 based on param t that goes from 0 - 1. I’m sure there exists one but I
tried all sorts of fancy math I knew for a day or two and still had major
trouble writing it down as a single equation function.

Then I thought about it in a different way after I ate a fruit and realized I
need an orange analogy. What if we cut slices of orange. The ends are crescent
shapes. Now it’s a matter of animating the crescents into rectangular strips
where the pointy ends stretches but the middle part remains the same.

Since in computer graphics, a sphere isn’t really a true sphere, but an
approximation with triangles the strip analogy works well. We just need to
animate the ends of triangles.

The gotcha is the pointy end of sphere expands from 0 to length of mercerator
projection (flat square) so they cut a tiny bit of the top and bottom
otherwise you have infinite stretching at the end

So you have three little functions. For an x,y in a square you figure out what
slice they go into and what side of the slice. The further to the poles, the
more you squeeze towards the center, so you get something like this
[https://blenderartists.org/t/producing-a-12-petal-gores-
from...](https://blenderartists.org/t/producing-a-12-petal-gores-from-a-uv-
projection-sphere/637809)

Then you have a blanket wrapping function I.e morphing a line into circle and
that’s a line -> arc -> circle animation. That’s not too hard. The arc of a
very large circle is almost flat. So you divide the line into two and animate
the left and right segments into two hemicircle arcs that then form a proper
circle. Kind of like curving the lines from the end to bend it into a circle.

Now longitudes and latitudes both go through this line to circle animation. To
get the z, we take the x arc position, the y arc position, the point on
crescent strip and we do matrix rotate transforms to get final x,y,z

So rather than it being one single equation (which i’m guessing is possible
using super crazy maths), we take a piecemeal approach and animate lots of
little segments that add up as a plane to sphere animation using simpler maths
and matrix transforms.

------
dilap
Very cool! It's always seemed a shame to me that we stick with highly-
inaccurate projections when we have the tech to do much better, simply out of
inertia. Double-cheers as well for ignoring the weird convention that you
shouldn't care about accurate sizing when looking a political rather than
satalite map.

------
pmilla1606
Looks like this isn't rolled out to everyone. I'm not seeing the 3D version
(logged in & incognito).

~~~
gefh
For rollouts like this, a small holdback experiment is typical, to assess long
term trends. Or maybe your browser doesn't have hardware acceleration enabled?
Or you could be in canvas mode? Try ?force=webgl on the end of the maps url in
case it's the latter. Try shadertoy.com to see if webgl is available.

~~~
retrogradeorbit
Webgl works on my browser. Shaders work. Google maps is still flat.
force=webgl does nothing. I'd say it's a partial roll out.

------
jld
If there's a job where I just get to explore the wonder of Google Maps all
day, I want it.

~~~
pkaye
Maybe the Google Maps QA team?

------
SiempreViernes
Finally we are rid of the biggest source of Mercator! Finally we can look at
the south pole!

~~~
SiempreViernes
Actually no, McMurdo remains a white sport still :(

~~~
MattBlissett
This is an unfinished demo from a while back, but I made vector and raster map
tiles in a WGS84 projection, so McMurdo is included — though you have to find
it yourself [1]

I'm unlikely to work on the globe, it's cool[2] but we don't really need it.
Maybe when OpenLayers Cesium[3] gets support for vector tiles, so we don't
have to see fuzzy, distorted raster tiles.

[1] [https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/temp-
debug.html](https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/temp-debug.html) (click "Toggle" in
the top right)

[2] [https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/](https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/)

[3] [https://openlayers.org/ol-cesium/](https://openlayers.org/ol-cesium/)

------
Symbiote
Openlayers Cesium provides a globe view for map tiles (or other data), it's it
not to much work to transition to a flat projection at a high zoom.

[https://openlayers.org/ol-
cesium/examples/sidebyside.html](https://openlayers.org/ol-
cesium/examples/sidebyside.html)

------
andrewaylett
I find it curious that it loads the old 2D representation first -- made me
think it wasn't working for a moment or two.

Also, is it just me or is zooming a bit broken at low zooms now? The globe
drifts as I zoom.

------
pseudonym2
So it's no longer a map application, because it's producing weird non-standard
projections, tiles that can't be stitched/georeferenced properly etc.

Will Google support and maintain an actual maps application? Or will they
merge google earth and google maps together in an even less capable tool
purely for consumers to wow at? Castrating Google Earth with the webgl version
and locking it into Chrome was bad enough. I wish this stops here.

~~~
CommieBobDole
Google Earth desktop edition is still available. And it's still approximately
ten thousand times better than the browser edition.

[https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html](https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html)

~~~
pseudonym2
It's gradually phased out. Right now it's essentially abandonware. At some
point in the future they'll just kill it out of the blue. Things that provide
value to advanced users don't matter to most of these "data-based" companies.

------
robius
While this is a great improvement, this is most needed on mobile devices.

This was especially a problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go games where you need
the map to be correct where it isn't. Even more difficult is using those apps
in places like the Arctic or Antarctic, there's no way to accurately place GPS
coordinates, deal with game portals or have directions other than the compass.

------
l5870uoo9y
You can see the difference between Africa, Congo and Greenland as mentioned in
the article: [https://imgur.com/a/g7uIYGN](https://imgur.com/a/g7uIYGN)

Greenland is the size of Congo, around 2,2 million km2 while entire Africa is
around 30 million km2. Europe being around 10 and North America 24 million
km2.

------
Hello71
I believe this makes Google Maps the only mainstream SaaS map providing
orthographic projection, and I wonder if that (partially) explains the recent
increase in Google Maps pricing (previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029)).

------
rurban
That's the technology behind: s2geometry
[https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/12/announcing-s2-libr...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/12/announcing-s2-library-
geometry-on-sphere.html)

Annoying that techcrunch could not find that out.

------
Kagerjay
What's really interesting that in 2D maps, every country had their own
variation of it.

If you were to take a 2D printed world map from America and compared it to a
2D printed world map, the sizes of continents wouldn't be the same, nor the
centerpiece of the map itself. It would always center around that respective
country first.

------
Animats
It never was a flat map. That was just a kludge to make it work in the
browser. The original application, from Keyhole, was 3D from 2003 or so.
NVidia used to offer it as a promotion, before Google bought it.

Now it's a Chrome browser promotion. Google Earth requires Google's browser.

~~~
unethical_ban
Google Maps.

------
huangc10
Just a note, they also changed how navigating works. It's almost as if the map
curves differently at different zooms. The physics is very cool but it is a
little nauseating. It is very realistic, almost like spinning a globe, but I'm
not sure if its more preferable.

------
vinayan3
There is a really good short youtube video about map projections and to
understand the tradeoffs that are made to create them.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ)

------
DoctorBit
A couple of suggestions for improvements: 1) Use quaternions instead of Euler
angles for rotation 2) Show latitude and longitude grid so it's easier to
identify equator and polar regions, etc...

~~~
nojvek
Langitude longitude grid would definitely make it easy to map it to the flag
mercaretor projection.

One can easily also correlate why things on the pole look so big when you have
evenly spaced latitudes in a sphere.

------
puzzle
This was going to launch years ago with the vector rewrite, but it was only
enabled for the globe mode (Earth/GL, complete with a simulation of the
objects in the sky). Interesting timing.

------
awinter-py
> as east and west in all flat mappes -- and I am one -- are one, so death
> touches the resurrection

\-- sermons of J Donne (as quoted by oppenheimer)

------
Groxx
As neat as this is, it's kinda a crummy experience in a few expectation-
breaking ways :\ Most notably perhaps: if you put your cursor on a spot on the
globe and scroll, you don't zoom there. You zoom somewhere in between.

Mostly things that can be fixed in the future (except perhaps "requires
multiple click-drags to go to the opposite side", where before you could see
most/all of the world at once). But it still seems a bit more shiny than
useful.

------
outworlder
I am always amazed to see how ridiculously huge the african continent is.
There are really huge countries over there.

------
lxe
Did the compass disappear? I'd like to still be able to rotate the map.

------
rm_-rf_slash
Apple Maps used to do this too. They took it away a few versions ago for
reasons I don’t quite understand. I really liked the “Pale Blue Dot”-like
overview of the Earth when zoomed out all the way.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Apple Maps (desktop version) still does this, but only in Satellite mode.
Which feels very intuitive, to be honest.

~~~
ISL
Of course, the definitive pale blue dot image was not taken by a satellite,
but rather a spacecraft on a hyperbolic trajectory.... ;).

------
mshaler
But time is still a flat circle.

------
dawnerd
Question is, will it destroy my battery like satellite view does?

~~~
gefh
No, surprisingly it's not much more expensive to render than Mercator.

~~~
dawnerd
Yeah pretty surprising. Did a test, switched over to sat view and my fans
ramped right up.

------
weka
I am honestly surprised how Google has not released a GPS navigator to compete
with TomTom or Garmin. It would absolutely demolish them in seconds.

~~~
kemitche
They already have: the smart phone in everyone's pocket.

