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Coordinate system != map projection. As far as I know, the map tiles google serves are still in mercator projection -- it's just that mercator was always desig
by erinaceousjones 8y ago
Coordinate system != map projection.
As far as I know, the map tiles google serves are still in mercator projection -- it's just that mercator was always designed to be projected onto a sphere, not a plane, so now it looks better.
What S2 is, is a better way of representing sets of coordinates within GIS systems, such that searching for features that are close to each other, or within a complex polygon, can be performed much quicker than with other coordinate reference systems ie. floating point latitude/longitude pairs. They're storing points on a 3D sphere (unit vectors) as easily subdivisible 64-bit integers which have a logical order which is much faster to index / iterate over nearby areas.
Makes sense for applications like google maps; "find local businesses near point X,Y" etc.
- TimSchumann 8y agoYeah I don't actually know if I was using the right terminology. Most of what I wrote in that comment stemmed from me asking a friend 'Hey, so that thing you work on -- looks less flat and more round. What's up with that?' If I remember correctly, he also mentioned something about the same project being responsible for better stitching and less overlaps/voids in the map. Thanks for explaining though, helped me understand things a bit better.
- mynewtb 8y agoThe mercator projection is designed to project a ~sphere onto a plane. The distorted tiles are now being redistorted to drape the plane back onto the sphere.