Screens are a transitional display medium: ubiquitous holographic projection will make them as paper is to screens today.
Mourning the End of Paper Maps
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#32There is no way that digital maps are anywhere near as practical, let alone more practical, yet. Digital maps: * rely on precious battery charge and weight * aren't very robust * are extremely hard to use in the dark or with night vision * can't be cut and folded into something small and light enough to hold in a hand * when portable aren't large enough for displaying on a table or wall for people to gather around
I'd dispute this. I built a vector tile package out of OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago. This gives you offline building level mapping for the entire globe on an SD card, and can be displayed on a smartphone app. Whilst OSM isn't perfect and coverage is variable, one would have to get pretty far off the beaten track for it not to be of at least some practical use. So with this capability all you need is a charged…
What are you disputing about the arguments I made though? There's no point having the whole world on an SD card if you can't see the device at night, can't see it through your optics, and you can't display the map on a wall or a table for everyone to get around.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#33It might be an unpopular opinion, but in my experience a sizable amount of paper maps is just bad. I have more than once regretted buying hiking maps which where missing trails or roads. These will die first (if they haven’t already), and I can’t say I am sorry.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#34Paper maps will prevail as long as not-rich people are interested in (real) outdoor activities.
Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had.
I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books.
The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books, well I guess I won't read on my subway ride home. If my map does that in northern Scandinavia, well now I am fucked.
Just print 5 maps and laminate them and you're pretty safe against weather and time. Not so much with a digital map.
Print something and it will show that print as long as it is not physically destructed. Not so much with a digital map ("oh, our services don't work in this country ha ha. Did you not read the t&c?")
Sun glare. Off the grid for three weeks. Weight. None of this is a problem with analog maps.
I guess you can solve most of these problems by throwing lots of money at god knows what military/navy device, thus I specified non-rich people. Or you know, just use a paper map.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I guess so... apart from all the other downsides about size and robustness and things.
E-ink is used in the Amazon Kindle's which take quite a bit of abuse and run just about forever on a battery charge. Of course all the usual comparisons between paper and technology still hold. There was a cartoon on that subject where they re-invented paper as an improvement on the laptop. 'Can be read in full sunlight', 'lasts for 100's of years on a single charge', 'can be burned safely in a pinch' and so on.
I'd hate to try to pan and zoom on a map to try to navigate using an e-ink kindle with the refresh rate and flashing it's just barely usable as an ebook reader with page flips but anything interactive like scrolling on a page is pretty bad the few times I've tried.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#36Paper maps will prevail as long as not-rich people are interested in (real) outdoor activities. Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had. I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books. The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books,…
Can confirm. I run the Great Lakes Relay [1] each year. It's a 275 mile course along northern Michigan. We go through some heavily wooded areas for multiple days at a time. We usually do not have cell service. Even GPS is spotty at times. Furthermore, the driving directions and running directions don't always use roads. Here's some examples:
Driving directions: turn left at C509 (unmarked) for 2.9 miles. The exchange is past the creek. There will be big puddles, plow through them.
Problems happen when you're in a Honda civic that can't go through 2.5 feet of water. So you have to turn around and find your own way to the exchange, with no cell service.
We always bring multiple copies of a Michigan Atlas. This way we can pinpoint where we are (using GPS) and find nearby roads, despite the terrible race directions.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#37I actually print and use paper maps a lot, specifically topographic maps. We do a decent amount of backcountry riding, and while not completely accurate, the USFS and USGS maps have various trails marked on them that are useful. USGS publishes nicely formatted quadrangle-sized PDFs when smaller areas are enough, and CalTopo provides custom PDF generation when it’s more useful to specify a range. These I print at home…
Yeah, I'll carry a paper map for mountain biking out where I may not have a cell phone signal, as a backup to any maps stored on the phone. That said, I remember saving up a bit of money as a kid to get 2 or 3 USGS topo maps. Now, I can get pretty good topo maps of the entire world for free from my browser. That's a beautiful thing.
Have you used trailforks.com from pinkbike? Their app combines a lot of data with the actual map, plus it's hard to beat how current they are due to crowd-sourcing. Definitely focused on biking but expanding into other users and works offline.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#38Paper maps will prevail as long as not-rich people are interested in (real) outdoor activities. Paper maps have a consistency and security no digital navigation device I ever owned or saw ever had. I realize this is a kind of "get off my lawn" argument one could also make about digital vs analog newspapers, or books. The key is: If my Kindle decides to do some weird updating and requires re-downloading all my books,…
As far as I know, the US Army still teaches land navigation using a paper map, protractor, pencil, and compass. At least they did when I was in (early 2000s).
Getting caught with a GPS-capable device on the land nav course was considered cheating.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
E-ink is used in the Amazon Kindle's which take quite a bit of abuse and run just about forever on a battery charge. Of course all the usual comparisons between paper and technology still hold. There was a cartoon on that subject where they re-invented paper as an improvement on the laptop. 'Can be read in full sunlight', 'lasts for 100's of years on a single charge', 'can be burned safely in a pinch' and so on.
I'd hate to try to pan and zoom on a map to try to navigate using an e-ink kindle with the refresh rate and flashing it's just barely usable as an ebook reader with page flips but anything interactive like scrolling on a page is pretty bad the few times I've tried.
Try panning and zooming on a piece of paper... that's the benchmark here. I've had the pleasure of toting along a couple of kilos of maps of all the roads in Europe for years, I would not part with my TomTom for the best set of maps and the most elegant of night lights.
Re: Mourning the End of Paper Maps
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was with you until the 'extremely hard to use in the dark or with night vision' because that is just about the only time they work much better than paper ones. But maps of all sorts are a dying breed, the bulk of the uses for maps were to find directions and turn-by-turn voice navigation has made the map component pretty much optional.
What displays do you use for in the dark? For paper you can shine a pin-point of green light and read it. That works for old-style LCD like a CASIO watch but I've not seen it work for a display designed to be backlit like a tablet. And you'd need a specially adapted display that used an IR backlight to use with night vision - I haven't seen something like that in practice. My smart watch has a night vision mode, but…
>What displays do you use for in the dark? For paper you can shine a pin-point of green light and read it. That works for old-style LCD like a CASIO watch but I've not seen it work for a display designed to be backlit like a tablet.
Why do you need to shine light on a backlight? You can read it directly at night.
>And you'd need a specially adapted display that used an IR backlight to use with night vision - I haven't seen something like that in practice. My smart watch has a night vision mode, but that's an LCD.
Who, aside the army uses night vision?