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Map of all the buildings in the world

gizmodo.com

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#11
post #2

At least in Firefox, this page doesn't scroll at all. No scrollbar, scroll wheel/cursor keys/PageDown all do nothing. How does someone screw up CSS so completely?

You have uBlock Origin or another ad blocker installed, their cookie banner disables scrolling but your ad blocker is blocking the cookie banner (same thing happened to me)

Same here with uBlock on iOS. This happens every now and then, not too often. But when it does, I usually decide the page is probably not worth reading anyway.

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#12
post #10

So here is finally the data that I needed for my idea: walk directions from A to B while never leaving the shadows, suggesting bars and pubs where to wait while the shadows catch up and let you cross “safely” where before was sunny. Useful for scorching weather places like south of Spain.

I do a similar game when walking around but the complete inverse. I live in the UK.

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#14

All of the houses on my block are very weird shapes on this map, it doesn't reflect reality very well

I haven't visited the map, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they didn't attempt to re-create the building shapes, just location and estimated size. The real shape seems pointless for this dataset.

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#15
post #6

For sure not all buildings. My first query was "Costa del Este, Juan Díaz, Distrito de Panamá, Panamá Province, Panama" and no coverage. This region is packed with high rises.

Yup, check my home neighborhood and it is good coverage, but checked a rural area I know has houses around a lake (not just tiny fishing shacks, full-sized 200+m^2 houses) with addresses and electrical and telecom/internet service, but there there are no buildings shown. Plus, even though there is a lot of tree coverage, many of the houses are clearly visible in Google Satellite View, so it is unclear why they wouldn't have been picked up.

Cool stuff, but they still have work to do.

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#16
post #10

So here is finally the data that I needed for my idea: walk directions from A to B while never leaving the shadows, suggesting bars and pubs where to wait while the shadows catch up and let you cross “safely” where before was sunny. Useful for scorching weather places like south of Spain.

I do a similar game when walking around but the complete inverse. I live in the UK.

So running directions from B to A while never touching any shade, suggesting churches and rehab centers to ignore while the shadows stay perfectly still?

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#17
post #10

So here is finally the data that I needed for my idea: walk directions from A to B while never leaving the shadows, suggesting bars and pubs where to wait while the shadows catch up and let you cross “safely” where before was sunny. Useful for scorching weather places like south of Spain.

You can fool me Dracula

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#18

All of the houses on my block are very weird shapes on this map, it doesn't reflect reality very well

If it was able to detect roughly how many buildings there are in that area, that’s already fairly useful at global scale. It seems they are focused on measuring urbanization. It’s good to know though that it may be dodgy at that level of granularity.

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#19
post #15
post #6

For sure not all buildings. My first query was "Costa del Este, Juan Díaz, Distrito de Panamá, Panamá Province, Panama" and no coverage. This region is packed with high rises.

Yup, check my home neighborhood and it is good coverage, but checked a rural area I know has houses around a lake (not just tiny fishing shacks, full-sized 200+m^2 houses) with addresses and electrical and telecom/internet service, but there there are no buildings shown. Plus, even though there is a lot of tree coverage, many of the houses are clearly visible in Google Satellite View, so it is unclear why they wouldn…

The reason, I would guess, is that it takes at least a couple satellite passes to be able to get the 3D data, and then a processing step to actually obtain it, and they've not done that for sparsely populated areas.

Re: Map of all the buildings in the world

#20
post #10

So here is finally the data that I needed for my idea: walk directions from A to B while never leaving the shadows, suggesting bars and pubs where to wait while the shadows catch up and let you cross “safely” where before was sunny. Useful for scorching weather places like south of Spain.

Would need this, inverted, for winter.
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