from Hacker News

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

by herrherr on 4/30/15, 11:21 AM with 220 comments

  • by jamesfe on 4/30/15, 3:49 PM

    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?"

  • by Doctor_Fegg on 4/30/15, 12:30 PM

    "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/

  • by quinndupont on 4/30/15, 3:27 PM

    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

  • by dietrichepp on 4/30/15, 12:21 PM

    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?

  • by Demiurge on 4/30/15, 12:33 PM

    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/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers

  • by srj on 4/30/15, 1:39 PM

    "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!

  • by bedatadriven on 4/30/15, 12:30 PM

    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 :-)

  • by derefr on 4/30/15, 3:54 PM

    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.

  • by andyjdavis on 4/30/15, 11:11 PM

    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.

  • by lazyant on 4/30/15, 1:05 PM

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

  • by kens on 4/30/15, 3:15 PM

    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.

  • by xt on 4/30/15, 12:17 PM

    Very cool. But I was surprised to see he chose Mercator.

    See: https://xkcd.com/977/

  • by ZeroGravitas on 4/30/15, 11:28 AM

    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.

  • by hiby007 on 4/30/15, 3:43 PM

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

  • by btbuildem on 4/30/15, 1:41 PM

    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..

  • by facorreia on 4/30/15, 11:47 AM

    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.

  • by jkot on 4/30/15, 3:22 PM

    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.

  • by haihaibye on 4/30/15, 12:48 PM

    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/contempora...

  • by chriswarbo on 4/30/15, 3:13 PM

    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 :)

  • by stefap2 on 4/30/15, 3:29 PM

    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?

  • by zeristor on 4/30/15, 1:31 PM

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

  • by smegel on 4/30/15, 10:07 PM

    > 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).

  • by bluedino on 4/30/15, 12:34 PM

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

  • by nether on 4/30/15, 6:43 PM

    For more fun, check out this raised relief map of California: http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm (discussed at http://redd.it/34azy8)

    For a CA transplant who does a lot of driving up and down the state, this map has been fascinating.

  • by vilhelm_s on 4/30/15, 3:48 PM

    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.

  • by imaginenore on 4/30/15, 1:07 PM

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

  • by malandrew on 4/30/15, 8:09 PM

    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://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-ope...

    http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/

  • by kichuku on 4/30/15, 12:26 PM

    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?

  • by haberman on 4/30/15, 6:32 PM

    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.

  • by chrissyb on 5/1/15, 7:26 AM

    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

    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

  • by DigitalSea on 4/30/15, 11:37 PM

    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.

  • by thom on 4/30/15, 4:49 PM

    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.

  • by zongitsrinzler on 4/30/15, 1:04 PM

    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).

  • by alexqgb on 4/30/15, 6:29 PM

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

  • by barbs on 5/1/15, 12:02 AM

    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 :).

  • by crumpled on 4/30/15, 4:51 PM

    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.

  • by yuletide666 on 5/1/15, 1:03 AM

    Such a tragedy that he used Mercator for this :(

  • by axus on 5/1/15, 2:05 AM

    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.htm...

  • by brotoss on 4/30/15, 3:28 PM

    Or you can just buy this big ass one from Ikea for 129 bucks:

    http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/

  • by sebastianconcpt on 5/1/15, 7:30 PM

    Nice project. BTW the guy also made a trip to Chernobyl and shared some nice pics:

    http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/

  • by ChrisArchitect on 4/30/15, 2:34 PM

    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

  • by mparramon on 4/30/15, 10:45 PM

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

  • by jaytaylor on 4/30/15, 4:27 PM

    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.

  • by hitlin37 on 4/30/15, 1:55 PM

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

  • by faisalkhalid80 on 4/30/15, 4:27 PM

    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

  • by rcknr on 4/30/15, 3:00 PM

    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.

  • by cwmma on 4/30/15, 6:31 PM

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

  • by Klasiaster on 5/1/15, 12:46 PM

  • by alinspired on 4/30/15, 8:13 PM

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

  • by davidslv on 4/30/15, 3:46 PM

    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.

  • by JCordeiro on 5/1/15, 1:36 PM

    This is a very cool project. Turned out nice!

  • by spronkey on 5/9/15, 7:15 AM

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

  • by amelius on 4/30/15, 12:15 PM

    > I've spent 1,5 years working on this project

    So wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a huge display then? :)

  • by Thiz on 4/30/15, 6:45 PM

    Greenland is fucking huge.

  • by cmstoken on 4/30/15, 7:10 PM

    Amazing work!

  • by mreiland on 4/30/15, 1:13 PM

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

  • by pambospalas on 4/30/15, 9:05 PM

    awesome article!

  • by carlob on 4/30/15, 4:40 PM

    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/ I'm not sure they'd ship internationally though (or at all, for an item of that size).

  • by 3327 on 4/30/15, 12:28 PM

    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.