8 ms·

Making The World's Most Detailed Print Maps

120 points by mparr4 5y ago

mparr4 5y ago
Ramble Maps co-owner here. Happy to answer any questions about our process or our maps. Co-owner and I are long-time HNers. Psyched to be on the front page!
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Your contiguous US-states map (and it seems many of your other maps, though not e.g. the North America map or the world map) uses a Mercator map projection: https://ramblemaps.com/continental-us-map https://ramblemaps.com/continental-us-map This is a reasonable choice for sailing charts (makes rhumb lines straight) and a reasonable choice for a zoomable web map of the world built around raster tiles (avoids the need for client-side reprojection), but is an uncommon – and in my opinion generally poor – choice for maps of the contiguous US states. What made you settle on that one? Or was it just the existing projection of the data, and you decided not to reproject it? I think many of your maps would work a bit better (suffer substantially less distortion) if they used a region-specific projection. I have a long-term interest in map projections and would be happy to chat about possibilities if you have questions.
  - mparr4 5y ago
    We settled on this choice after originally using alternate projections. The source data is not in mercator, we specifically reproject to mercator. I don't disagree with you, I personally prefer other projections for many of our maps, but after the hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" we realized that people think of their state (and country, in the case of CONUS) in mercator, so we decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight. For other countries, we tend to use locale specific projections. One projection question for you, while we're chatting: do you have a favorite Asian projection? I wanted to center the projection on center mass, which would mean changing the poles, but couldn't figure that out!
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      > hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" Funny enough, when I see either the USA map or the California map in Mercator projection, the first thing that comes to mind is “wow the shape is completely wrong!” :-) > favorite Asian projection? Asia is huge, so you are necessarily going to get a lot of distortion of one kind or another. It’s a close-enough-to-circular blobby shape that you might be fine with some azimuthal projection. If you want to preserve local shapes but don’t mind variation in scale, you can use a stereographic projection centered roughly on the circumcenter. If you want to reduce distance errors while allowing a bit of local shape distortion, you could use an azimuthal equidistant projection. (In either case, you could probably get away with either an assumed spherical earth, or you could properly correct for the ellipsoid. The difference between the two would not be too obvious at a glance.) There are various other projections you could try. You might find one or another aesthetically better. For example perhaps some oblique conic projection would fit the region slightly better than the azimuthal projection. Or you could try something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projectio... Here’s e.g. a nice comparison of some possible projections for Europe: https://observablehq.com/@toja/five-map-projections-for-europe https://observablehq.com/@toja/five-map-projections-for-euro...
      - mparr4 5y ago
        Thanks for the link. We used Lambert Conformal Conic for Europe and Robinson for Asia, but I'm not thrilled with the Asia projection. I really want to be able to change the latitude the projection is centered on, but haven't been able to figure out how to move that point yet, so we've got more skew near the pole than we do at the bottom of the map. Feels like it could be better.
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  Did you two meet through HN?
  - mparr4 5y ago
    Nope. We are friends from high school. He found PGs essays in 2009 and we started our first company together in 2010.
- neolog 5y ago
  What kind of processing do you do on the data before printing?
  - mparr4 5y ago
    I plan to write another post on that with some images to show the steps, but the process differs a bit between our black+white and our satellite+hillshade images. For the black and white, we pull in the relevant elevation models, merging various sources as necessary, compose the map (rotate if it helps), choose hillshade angle to highlight desired terrain, then export to photoshop. Having been doing this for a while now we spend most of our time in Photoshop, adjusting color curves and healing irregularities (there seem to be more for LiDAR than for the standard 1/3 arc second DEM). For our satellite + hillshade maps the process is a bit more involved. We actually remove the natural hillshade from the source image and add our own. This helps with perception of terrain (humans tend to perceive terrain as inverted if the sunlight is coming from the bottom of the image) and allows us to really play off the metallic print and get some pop. Even more photoshopping for these "maps."
- Archelaos 5y ago
  I am not a native English speaker, but I am wondering, why you call the printings "maps". Aren't they rather high resolution satellite images? Wikipedia defines a map as "a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes."[1] And are your images really more detailled than cadastral maps (scale 1:1000) that are nowadays recording the location of a boundary stones with a maximum deviation of ±3 to 5 cm? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map
  - ghaff 5y ago
    These aren't simply photographs but they do seem to fall on the photographic, rather than the map, end of the scale. Raven Maps is a good source of (large) high quality maps that are more traditionally map-like--though some of theirs are pretty photographically oriented as well.
  - mparr4 5y ago
    Our black and white images (such as the image on the linked article) aren't satellite images at all, they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade. We do have some color images that use satellite imagery and the creation of those images is going to be the subject of my next post. We do things like remove the natural hillshade and apply our own (due to a quirk of human perception where sun coming from below causes terrain to be perceived as inverted) and blending images from different days, etc. Re: is this really a "map?" That's a comment we get quite a bit, especially in FB comments on our ads. These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with. Re: detail. It's all about the size of the area you are printing. Our world map uses 30-meter data, but you'd need to print it on the side of a building to see the limit to the detail. So in our sizes, using 3-5cm data wouldn't improve the maps, you wouldn't be able to see any of that detail. We only make maps if that is true.
    - Archelaos 5y ago
      > ... they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade. > ... These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with. Okay, that makes sense to a certain degree. Seems what you are doing is innovative enough that it deserves a new category of "map". Have you considered transfering your methods from the macro to the micro world? If I understand it correctly, you could in principle inverse the zoom factors, like using the elevation model of a coin combined with texture data and a lighting model and printing a much larger version of it on a canvas.
- heleninboodler 5y ago
  Have you considered printing at imagesetter resolutions like 2540 and including a magnifier a la the compact OED?
  - mparr4 5y ago
    I have not. If there's a market for it, I'd do it, but I would guess there isn't. Might be a cool experiment to try for a map. If nothing else, it sounds fun.
    - heleninboodler 5y ago
      I think it could be really amazing for some of your really big maps if you could walk into a room and go "whoa, that's a seriously detailed map" and then get handed the magnifier and go even deeper. Even if you only had super-resolution data for some of the big features stitched in.
      - heleninboodler 5y ago
        A raw piece of imagesetter film behind glass or acrylic and in front of a white background would probably look pretty cool (great contrast), although you'd have some mechanical challenges getting it mounted without bubbles. It may require a fairly thick piece of glass to get enough pressure in the center, and it may require a bezel so you can clamp/glue it to the backing securely.
- AdamTReineke 5y ago
  What's the source for your LIDAR data? Publicly available government sets or do you have to commission your own scans?
  - mparr4 5y ago
    All public. At this point if the data doesn't exist, we're out of luck. I don't anticipate wall art being lucrative enough to commission our own scans. For areas the size of what we tend to map you need an airplane, a drone would take weeks to survey some of them.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Your maps are amazing, but the selection is still pretty limited. Are you planning to ever have "DIY" maps, where you could select a chunk of the globe and have that printed? Or is there too much handcrafted custom tweaking required for each map to make that feasible? If the answer is "no plans/infeasible", please at least consider adding Sydney (maybe in color?), I'm pretty sure it would look incredible.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mparr4 5y ago
    Thank you! Unfortunately we won't be doing any choose-your-own maps, we really do spend a bunch of time on each one. I don't think we could maintain nearly the level of quality that we like. I'd love to map Sydney. We're doing a city push right now but starting with US cities, as selling internationally adds some business complexity that we've been trying to avoid so far. As the business grows, we certainly do hope to have more maps outside of the US, and to be able to sell there as well!
- sandwichinvest 5y ago
  These maps are beautiful! Excellent work. Especially love the face-mounted acrylic option.
- K33P4D 5y ago
  I have a controversial question for you... let's say I order a map of India from India, would you give me a map with all the sections of the country intact (Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh) or would you give us a china approved section of India without Kashmir or bits of the east (like how google serves its maps)? How do you manage to withhold or incorporate sketchy borders with geopolitical issues, or do you refrain from serving such locations altogether to avoid any backlash?
  - est 5y ago
    I think they just provide terrain maps without any human defined borderlines. You can draw whatever lines you want after you purchased them.
  - hoseja 5y ago
    The prints seem rectangular. You'll just get a rectangular area of Earth's surface, with no borders visible is my guess.
  - mparr4 5y ago
    We have an India map. The other commenters are right: no borders, just terrain. https://ramblemaps.com/india-map https://ramblemaps.com/india-map
- itronitron 5y ago
  I've been looking for detailed large format region maps with labeled locations, and ideally with time points as well for various sites and boundaries. There is a notable lack of quality options so a potential market for you there, or if you know of a good source can you post the link here? :)
- cameronh90 5y ago
  One of the more challenging issues I face when walking in the UK, Scotland especially, is knowing the type of surface. Often something appears passable on Ordinance Survey and OSM maps, but once you actually get there you find it's a bog, marsh or other type of terrain impassable with walking boots. Sometimes it's terrain that would be passable if dry, but when wet becomes too slippery (e.g. lots of very small but steep dirt mounds) or filled with streams. Are you aware of a good solution to this?
filleokus 5y ago
Really cool looking maps! Most printed large format things I see every day definitely looks worse than e.g 5K iMac screens when you get closer than a couple of feet from it. Would be cool to see something like this IRL I wonder if it’s possible to use something like photolithography to create incredibly high dpi “3D prints” for elevation maps like this? Maybe some parts would look flat, but you would be able to discern elevation based on touch?
- mparr4 5y ago
  Thanks! Yea, I think we are as close as wall art can get to a high quality screen - we optimize for contrast on the print. And while unlike a screen you need to provide light for a print, the effect of the light on the print is pretty engaging. It changes as you move around it. (It is not, please nobody buy one thinking they are!) If you're ever looking to print some photos to hang on your wall, it's definitely worth considering metallic paper + face mounted acrylic glass. It has unrivaled "pop" among print options. I don't know much about photolithography, but a quick search is intriguing. I'll have to put it on my to-learn-about list.
adamjb 5y ago
Do you know when (year/season) the two DEMs are from for the Mount Olympus example? I think I can see noticeable glacial retreat
- mparr4 5y ago
  Fall of 2014 for the LiDAR. I am not sure about the other DEM though.
gautamcgoel 5y ago
Do your state maps show cities? From the pics it looked like they only show natural features.
- mparr4 5y ago
  Nope, the state maps are pure elevation maps. We do have some city maps and are working on more right now (Seattle and LA are in progress).
bujak300 5y ago
Amazing. I miss the Alps, would buy them in a heartbeat
kragen 5y ago
A notable inconsistency, or exaggeration: > we print our maps using the highest resolution mediums available. ... There's no sense printing at a higher resolution than humans are able to perceive. For print, 300 dpi is the gold standard. Higher resolution media such as https://www.norsam.com/lanlreport.html https://www.norsam.com/lanlreport.html are around 20000 dpi. Current semiconductor processes https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296154-how-are-process-nodes-defined https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296154-how-are-process... have feature sizes around 20 nm, which is about 1.3 million dpi. This is significantly denser than 300 dpi. It's easy to see the difference between a page printed at 300 dpi and one printed at 600 dpi, so I'd say even 300 dpi doesn't reach "higher resolution than humans are able to perceive". How long have more detailed mediums (or media) been available? In 01949 George Harrison reported improving the control loop of a ruling engine to a precision of, in the medieval units then in use, 0.2 micro-inches (5 nm): https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-8-495 https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-... so that he could cut grooves for a diffraction grating to that precision, which evidently amounts to a precision of 5 million dpi. This seems to have been about a factor of 70 improvement over what Michelson had achieved before 01900. But serious difficulties attended any attempts to use such diffraction ruling engines to cut irregular patterns such as these maps—as well, of course, as limits in the data bandwidth of the necessary control systems. More detailed media still have been demonstrated; in 01989 hackers at IBM demonstrated the ability to use an STM to position atoms with atomic precision (≈0.1 nm) https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/imaging/30-years-moving-atoms-scanning/97/i44 https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/imaging/30-years-mo... and in 02013 other hackers at IBM used this technique to make the famous stop-motion animation, "A boy and his atom" out of a few dozen carbon monoxide molecules on a metal surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 0.1 nm precision is about 250 million dpi, almost a million times more detailed than Ramble's maps, or a trillion times if you count by detail per unit area. This is almost as high resolution as you're going to get with matter made out of atoms, although you can improve on it by about an order of magnitude by using, say, lithium hydride. But this resolution has been available for something like 30 years now, though you could reasonably argue that xenon atoms adsorbed to cryogenic copper were not an adequately durable medium. It's an interesting thought to think about a scale model of Earth printed with this resolution. Ramble carefully omitted any quantitative information about the resolution of their elevation models from this post, though in this thread they say their standard DEM data is ⅓", which is 10 meters; you can download free 30-meter-resolution DEM from USGS https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-global-elevation-data?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-global-elevation-d... and Airbus offers to sell you 12-meter resolution data https://www.intelligence-airbusds.com/imagery/reference-layers/worlddem/ https://www.intelligence-airbusds.com/imagery/reference-laye.... Much higher-resolution global data almost surely exists but is not available to the public—interferometric microwave SAR from satellites can get down to centimeter resolution https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/backgrounders/what-is-sar https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/backgrounders/what-is-sar but is a strategic advantage for change detection (surveillance) and navigation of things like cruise missiles (when GPS is unavailable). But suppose you have a 1-cm-resolution DEM of Earth, 5.1 exapixels of data (probably about 5 exabytes, 5.1 million terabytes, about US$100 million of disk), as surely the national spying agency of every spacefaring power does. If you were to print a relief map from it at single-atom resolution—0.1 nm—how big would that map be? Well, the radius of the Earth is 6371 km (the pole-equator distance was supposed to be 10'000 km, which would have made the radius 6366 km, but Humboldt's expedition lamentably made an 0.08% error in their measurements that we must now live with), and scaling that down by the ratio 1cm:0.1nm, or 100 million to 1, we end up with 63.71 mm radius, or 127.4 mm diameter. The scale model of the Grand Canyon would be 19 microns deep and 290 microns wide. The model earth, accurate to the centimeter, would easily fit in your hand, although hopefully it would be equipped with handles so a stray sand grain on your finger wouldn't dig a kilometer-deep trench across Iowa. You might very reasonably protest that a map that can only be read with an electron microscope, because nearly all its detail is smaller than the wavelength of light, is less than useful. So if we limit the map's resolution to what you can see with visible light—say, 400 nm—its scale is 4000 times larger. Your scale model of Earth would then be 510 meters across, the size of a small town. But you would still need a very fine optical microscope to see most of its detail. If you printed out sheets of this map on A3 paper, it would take 6.5 million pages, mostly ocean. Each sheet would cover 10.5 km × 7.4 km. There's still a lot of room at the bottom!
heyflyguy 5y ago
Do you have any plans to create 3d modeled maps that are printed on top of 3d printed plastics or sands? I am in the imagery business and have so many people ask for this, I've pondered what it would take many times. Neat product!
- mparr4 5y ago
  Thank you! It's a question we often get, but not a product we're looking to pursue. I think it would be prohibitively expensive to do it right and I'm not confident there's a big enough market for it. I could be dead wrong about this, of course.
- josiahpeters 5y ago
  I have been using GIS data to create 3d carvings out of wood with CNC machines. We've been having tons of fun iterating and learning. We started selling a few here and there and have been trying to optimize our workflow to be able to create a map for any location we can find data for in a reasonable amount of time. http://imgur.com/gallery/kXdCKqo http://imgur.com/gallery/kXdCKqo
jpxw 5y ago
Some (unsolicited) advice (this is HN after all): there’s a typo in this post (human's should be humans). There are other more subtle grammar issues in the post, too. Some of the language on the front page could be tightened up too. The product looks awesome though. I’d probably buy one if I lived in the US.
- mparr4 5y ago
  I agree. Posting to HN = soliciting advice. Thanks for yours! Fixed humans. Will review the rest! Anything in particular on the home page you don't like?
brensmith 5y ago
These are beautiful maps, and I'd love to add one to my collection. If anyone is a fan of adding depth to old maps, check out https://scottreinhard.com/Mapping-and-Visualization https://scottreinhard.com/Mapping-and-Visualization. Not sure if he's selling them any longer, but they're beautifully rendered.
- nthobe 5y ago
  He's still selling them. I bought one last year. https://scottreinhardmaps.com/ https://scottreinhardmaps.com/
ecommerceguy 5y ago
What azimuth do you typically use or does it vary with geographies?
- mparr4 5y ago
  I assume you're referring to the azimuth we place the sun for the hillshade? If so, it varies, though it is almost always coming from the top, generally from the upper left. Exactly where it is coming from depends on the terrain, we'll move it around within a 45 degree window around 337.5 and see what makes the particular landscape look best.
zestyping 5y ago
This printing technique would be absolutely stunning for electron micrographs, astrophotography, or terrain of other planets!
- mparr4 5y ago
  We've got mars and the moon on the site. I've been wanting to do some of the recently released Martian craters. They would look killer! I've never thought of electron micrographs but just did a google image search and wow, I have to agree!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gabereiser 5y ago
pretty awesome but the prices for a 30x40 are 10x the cost of my own prints at that size on the same material.
- mparr4 5y ago
  We sell wall art. You likely don't look at a painting by your favorite artist and say "This is overpriced. I bet the canvas and paint only cost $10." Also, Ramble Maps is a business. We have material costs, shipping costs, advertising costs, rent. We accept returns (and pay for return shipping), spend time making maps, answering emails, and writing posts like this. And finally, can you let me know where you can get those materials? Those prices are far better than what we pay!
  - gabereiser 5y ago
    Yeah, no disrespect, I understand you're a business. For example, someone with a little bit of knowledge of GIS and some google skills could create an image of GMTED2010 data and upload it to a printing service for around $260 for a 30"x40". Those with access to printers could do it for about 1/2 that with the right sublimation gear or large format inkjets. I was comparing your 30x45 with 30x40 prints I do of my own works. Granted it's not flyover LiDAR, its space art, but still. I'm not your target customer, but I do wish you the best.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
Nevermark 5y ago
The author states that at 300dpi they cannot perceive any loss of detail with 20/15 vision. But a higher standard would be if at any distance, they cannot perceive a difference between 300 and 400dpi. Maybe the result would be the same, maybe that was even tested, but when I hear something is the best of the best I am going to look for even a tiny window of improvement!

120 points by mparr4 5y ago

Ramble Maps co-owner here. Happy to answer any questions about our process or our maps. Co-owner and I are long-time HNers. Psyched to be on the front page!

jacobolus 5y ago
Your contiguous US-states map (and it seems many of your other maps, though not e.g. the North America map or the world map) uses a Mercator map projection: https://ramblemaps.com/continental-us-map https://ramblemaps.com/continental-us-map This is a reasonable choice for sailing charts (makes rhumb lines straight) and a reasonable choice for a zoomable web map of the world built around raster tiles (avoids the need for client-side reprojection), but is an uncommon – and in my opinion generally poor – choice for maps of the contiguous US states. What made you settle on that one? Or was it just the existing projection of the data, and you decided not to reproject it? I think many of your maps would work a bit better (suffer substantially less distortion) if they used a region-specific projection. I have a long-term interest in map projections and would be happy to chat about possibilities if you have questions.
- mparr4 5y ago
  We settled on this choice after originally using alternate projections. The source data is not in mercator, we specifically reproject to mercator. I don't disagree with you, I personally prefer other projections for many of our maps, but after the hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" we realized that people think of their state (and country, in the case of CONUS) in mercator, so we decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight. For other countries, we tend to use locale specific projections. One projection question for you, while we're chatting: do you have a favorite Asian projection? I wanted to center the projection on center mass, which would mean changing the poles, but couldn't figure that out!
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    > hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" Funny enough, when I see either the USA map or the California map in Mercator projection, the first thing that comes to mind is “wow the shape is completely wrong!” :-) > favorite Asian projection? Asia is huge, so you are necessarily going to get a lot of distortion of one kind or another. It’s a close-enough-to-circular blobby shape that you might be fine with some azimuthal projection. If you want to preserve local shapes but don’t mind variation in scale, you can use a stereographic projection centered roughly on the circumcenter. If you want to reduce distance errors while allowing a bit of local shape distortion, you could use an azimuthal equidistant projection. (In either case, you could probably get away with either an assumed spherical earth, or you could properly correct for the ellipsoid. The difference between the two would not be too obvious at a glance.) There are various other projections you could try. You might find one or another aesthetically better. For example perhaps some oblique conic projection would fit the region slightly better than the azimuthal projection. Or you could try something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projectio... Here’s e.g. a nice comparison of some possible projections for Europe: https://observablehq.com/@toja/five-map-projections-for-europe https://observablehq.com/@toja/five-map-projections-for-euro...
    - mparr4 5y ago
      Thanks for the link. We used Lambert Conformal Conic for Europe and Robinson for Asia, but I'm not thrilled with the Asia projection. I really want to be able to change the latitude the projection is centered on, but haven't been able to figure out how to move that point yet, so we've got more skew near the pole than we do at the bottom of the map. Feels like it could be better.
pottertheotter 5y ago
Did you two meet through HN?
- mparr4 5y ago
  Nope. We are friends from high school. He found PGs essays in 2009 and we started our first company together in 2010.
neolog 5y ago
What kind of processing do you do on the data before printing?
- mparr4 5y ago
  I plan to write another post on that with some images to show the steps, but the process differs a bit between our black+white and our satellite+hillshade images. For the black and white, we pull in the relevant elevation models, merging various sources as necessary, compose the map (rotate if it helps), choose hillshade angle to highlight desired terrain, then export to photoshop. Having been doing this for a while now we spend most of our time in Photoshop, adjusting color curves and healing irregularities (there seem to be more for LiDAR than for the standard 1/3 arc second DEM). For our satellite + hillshade maps the process is a bit more involved. We actually remove the natural hillshade from the source image and add our own. This helps with perception of terrain (humans tend to perceive terrain as inverted if the sunlight is coming from the bottom of the image) and allows us to really play off the metallic print and get some pop. Even more photoshopping for these "maps."
Archelaos 5y ago
I am not a native English speaker, but I am wondering, why you call the printings "maps". Aren't they rather high resolution satellite images? Wikipedia defines a map as "a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes."[1] And are your images really more detailled than cadastral maps (scale 1:1000) that are nowadays recording the location of a boundary stones with a maximum deviation of ±3 to 5 cm? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map
- ghaff 5y ago
  These aren't simply photographs but they do seem to fall on the photographic, rather than the map, end of the scale. Raven Maps is a good source of (large) high quality maps that are more traditionally map-like--though some of theirs are pretty photographically oriented as well.
- mparr4 5y ago
  Our black and white images (such as the image on the linked article) aren't satellite images at all, they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade. We do have some color images that use satellite imagery and the creation of those images is going to be the subject of my next post. We do things like remove the natural hillshade and apply our own (due to a quirk of human perception where sun coming from below causes terrain to be perceived as inverted) and blending images from different days, etc. Re: is this really a "map?" That's a comment we get quite a bit, especially in FB comments on our ads. These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with. Re: detail. It's all about the size of the area you are printing. Our world map uses 30-meter data, but you'd need to print it on the side of a building to see the limit to the detail. So in our sizes, using 3-5cm data wouldn't improve the maps, you wouldn't be able to see any of that detail. We only make maps if that is true.
  - Archelaos 5y ago
    > ... they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade. > ... These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with. Okay, that makes sense to a certain degree. Seems what you are doing is innovative enough that it deserves a new category of "map". Have you considered transfering your methods from the macro to the micro world? If I understand it correctly, you could in principle inverse the zoom factors, like using the elevation model of a coin combined with texture data and a lighting model and printing a much larger version of it on a canvas.
heleninboodler 5y ago
Have you considered printing at imagesetter resolutions like 2540 and including a magnifier a la the compact OED?
- mparr4 5y ago
  I have not. If there's a market for it, I'd do it, but I would guess there isn't. Might be a cool experiment to try for a map. If nothing else, it sounds fun.
  - heleninboodler 5y ago
    I think it could be really amazing for some of your really big maps if you could walk into a room and go "whoa, that's a seriously detailed map" and then get handed the magnifier and go even deeper. Even if you only had super-resolution data for some of the big features stitched in.
    - heleninboodler 5y ago
      A raw piece of imagesetter film behind glass or acrylic and in front of a white background would probably look pretty cool (great contrast), although you'd have some mechanical challenges getting it mounted without bubbles. It may require a fairly thick piece of glass to get enough pressure in the center, and it may require a bezel so you can clamp/glue it to the backing securely.
AdamTReineke 5y ago
What's the source for your LIDAR data? Publicly available government sets or do you have to commission your own scans?
- mparr4 5y ago
  All public. At this point if the data doesn't exist, we're out of luck. I don't anticipate wall art being lucrative enough to commission our own scans. For areas the size of what we tend to map you need an airplane, a drone would take weeks to survey some of them.
Clewza313 5y ago
Your maps are amazing, but the selection is still pretty limited. Are you planning to ever have "DIY" maps, where you could select a chunk of the globe and have that printed? Or is there too much handcrafted custom tweaking required for each map to make that feasible? If the answer is "no plans/infeasible", please at least consider adding Sydney (maybe in color?), I'm pretty sure it would look incredible.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mparr4 5y ago
  Thank you! Unfortunately we won't be doing any choose-your-own maps, we really do spend a bunch of time on each one. I don't think we could maintain nearly the level of quality that we like. I'd love to map Sydney. We're doing a city push right now but starting with US cities, as selling internationally adds some business complexity that we've been trying to avoid so far. As the business grows, we certainly do hope to have more maps outside of the US, and to be able to sell there as well!
sandwichinvest 5y ago
These maps are beautiful! Excellent work. Especially love the face-mounted acrylic option.
K33P4D 5y ago
I have a controversial question for you... let's say I order a map of India from India, would you give me a map with all the sections of the country intact (Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh) or would you give us a china approved section of India without Kashmir or bits of the east (like how google serves its maps)? How do you manage to withhold or incorporate sketchy borders with geopolitical issues, or do you refrain from serving such locations altogether to avoid any backlash?
- est 5y ago
  I think they just provide terrain maps without any human defined borderlines. You can draw whatever lines you want after you purchased them.
- hoseja 5y ago
  The prints seem rectangular. You'll just get a rectangular area of Earth's surface, with no borders visible is my guess.
- mparr4 5y ago
  We have an India map. The other commenters are right: no borders, just terrain. https://ramblemaps.com/india-map https://ramblemaps.com/india-map
itronitron 5y ago
I've been looking for detailed large format region maps with labeled locations, and ideally with time points as well for various sites and boundaries. There is a notable lack of quality options so a potential market for you there, or if you know of a good source can you post the link here? :)
cameronh90 5y ago
One of the more challenging issues I face when walking in the UK, Scotland especially, is knowing the type of surface. Often something appears passable on Ordinance Survey and OSM maps, but once you actually get there you find it's a bog, marsh or other type of terrain impassable with walking boots. Sometimes it's terrain that would be passable if dry, but when wet becomes too slippery (e.g. lots of very small but steep dirt mounds) or filled with streams. Are you aware of a good solution to this?

filleokus 5y ago

Really cool looking maps! Most printed large format things I see every day definitely looks worse than e.g 5K iMac screens when you get closer than a couple of feet from it. Would be cool to see something like this IRL I wonder if it’s possible to use something like photolithography to create incredibly high dpi “3D prints” for elevation maps like this? Maybe some parts would look flat, but you would be able to discern elevation based on touch?

mparr4 5y ago
Thanks! Yea, I think we are as close as wall art can get to a high quality screen - we optimize for contrast on the print. And while unlike a screen you need to provide light for a print, the effect of the light on the print is pretty engaging. It changes as you move around it. (It is not, please nobody buy one thinking they are!) If you're ever looking to print some photos to hang on your wall, it's definitely worth considering metallic paper + face mounted acrylic glass. It has unrivaled "pop" among print options. I don't know much about photolithography, but a quick search is intriguing. I'll have to put it on my to-learn-about list.

adamjb 5y ago

Do you know when (year/season) the two DEMs are from for the Mount Olympus example? I think I can see noticeable glacial retreat

mparr4 5y ago
Fall of 2014 for the LiDAR. I am not sure about the other DEM though.

gautamcgoel 5y ago

Do your state maps show cities? From the pics it looked like they only show natural features.

mparr4 5y ago
Nope, the state maps are pure elevation maps. We do have some city maps and are working on more right now (Seattle and LA are in progress).

bujak300 5y ago

Amazing. I miss the Alps, would buy them in a heartbeat

kragen 5y ago

A notable inconsistency, or exaggeration: > we print our maps using the highest resolution mediums available. ... There's no sense printing at a higher resolution than humans are able to perceive. For print, 300 dpi is the gold standard. Higher resolution media such as https://www.norsam.com/lanlreport.html https://www.norsam.com/lanlreport.html are around 20000 dpi. Current semiconductor processes https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296154-how-are-process-nodes-defined https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296154-how-are-process... have feature sizes around 20 nm, which is about 1.3 million dpi. This is significantly denser than 300 dpi. It's easy to see the difference between a page printed at 300 dpi and one printed at 600 dpi, so I'd say even 300 dpi doesn't reach "higher resolution than humans are able to perceive". How long have more detailed mediums (or media) been available? In 01949 George Harrison reported improving the control loop of a ruling engine to a precision of, in the medieval units then in use, 0.2 micro-inches (5 nm): https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-8-495 https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-... so that he could cut grooves for a diffraction grating to that precision, which evidently amounts to a precision of 5 million dpi. This seems to have been about a factor of 70 improvement over what Michelson had achieved before 01900. But serious difficulties attended any attempts to use such diffraction ruling engines to cut irregular patterns such as these maps—as well, of course, as limits in the data bandwidth of the necessary control systems. More detailed media still have been demonstrated; in 01989 hackers at IBM demonstrated the ability to use an STM to position atoms with atomic precision (≈0.1 nm) https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/imaging/30-years-moving-atoms-scanning/97/i44 https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/imaging/30-years-mo... and in 02013 other hackers at IBM used this technique to make the famous stop-motion animation, "A boy and his atom" out of a few dozen carbon monoxide molecules on a metal surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 0.1 nm precision is about 250 million dpi, almost a million times more detailed than Ramble's maps, or a trillion times if you count by detail per unit area. This is almost as high resolution as you're going to get with matter made out of atoms, although you can improve on it by about an order of magnitude by using, say, lithium hydride. But this resolution has been available for something like 30 years now, though you could reasonably argue that xenon atoms adsorbed to cryogenic copper were not an adequately durable medium. It's an interesting thought to think about a scale model of Earth printed with this resolution. Ramble carefully omitted any quantitative information about the resolution of their elevation models from this post, though in this thread they say their standard DEM data is ⅓", which is 10 meters; you can download free 30-meter-resolution DEM from USGS https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-global-elevation-data?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-global-elevation-d... and Airbus offers to sell you 12-meter resolution data https://www.intelligence-airbusds.com/imagery/reference-layers/worlddem/ https://www.intelligence-airbusds.com/imagery/reference-laye.... Much higher-resolution global data almost surely exists but is not available to the public—interferometric microwave SAR from satellites can get down to centimeter resolution https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/backgrounders/what-is-sar https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/backgrounders/what-is-sar but is a strategic advantage for change detection (surveillance) and navigation of things like cruise missiles (when GPS is unavailable). But suppose you have a 1-cm-resolution DEM of Earth, 5.1 exapixels of data (probably about 5 exabytes, 5.1 million terabytes, about US$100 million of disk), as surely the national spying agency of every spacefaring power does. If you were to print a relief map from it at single-atom resolution—0.1 nm—how big would that map be? Well, the radius of the Earth is 6371 km (the pole-equator distance was supposed to be 10'000 km, which would have made the radius 6366 km, but Humboldt's expedition lamentably made an 0.08% error in their measurements that we must now live with), and scaling that down by the ratio 1cm:0.1nm, or 100 million to 1, we end up with 63.71 mm radius, or 127.4 mm diameter. The scale model of the Grand Canyon would be 19 microns deep and 290 microns wide. The model earth, accurate to the centimeter, would easily fit in your hand, although hopefully it would be equipped with handles so a stray sand grain on your finger wouldn't dig a kilometer-deep trench across Iowa. You might very reasonably protest that a map that can only be read with an electron microscope, because nearly all its detail is smaller than the wavelength of light, is less than useful. So if we limit the map's resolution to what you can see with visible light—say, 400 nm—its scale is 4000 times larger. Your scale model of Earth would then be 510 meters across, the size of a small town. But you would still need a very fine optical microscope to see most of its detail. If you printed out sheets of this map on A3 paper, it would take 6.5 million pages, mostly ocean. Each sheet would cover 10.5 km × 7.4 km. There's still a lot of room at the bottom!

heyflyguy 5y ago

Do you have any plans to create 3d modeled maps that are printed on top of 3d printed plastics or sands? I am in the imagery business and have so many people ask for this, I've pondered what it would take many times. Neat product!

mparr4 5y ago
Thank you! It's a question we often get, but not a product we're looking to pursue. I think it would be prohibitively expensive to do it right and I'm not confident there's a big enough market for it. I could be dead wrong about this, of course.
josiahpeters 5y ago
I have been using GIS data to create 3d carvings out of wood with CNC machines. We've been having tons of fun iterating and learning. We started selling a few here and there and have been trying to optimize our workflow to be able to create a map for any location we can find data for in a reasonable amount of time. http://imgur.com/gallery/kXdCKqo http://imgur.com/gallery/kXdCKqo

jpxw 5y ago

Some (unsolicited) advice (this is HN after all): there’s a typo in this post (human's should be humans). There are other more subtle grammar issues in the post, too. Some of the language on the front page could be tightened up too. The product looks awesome though. I’d probably buy one if I lived in the US.

mparr4 5y ago
I agree. Posting to HN = soliciting advice. Thanks for yours! Fixed humans. Will review the rest! Anything in particular on the home page you don't like?

brensmith 5y ago

These are beautiful maps, and I'd love to add one to my collection. If anyone is a fan of adding depth to old maps, check out https://scottreinhard.com/Mapping-and-Visualization https://scottreinhard.com/Mapping-and-Visualization. Not sure if he's selling them any longer, but they're beautifully rendered.

nthobe 5y ago
He's still selling them. I bought one last year. https://scottreinhardmaps.com/ https://scottreinhardmaps.com/

ecommerceguy 5y ago

What azimuth do you typically use or does it vary with geographies?

mparr4 5y ago
I assume you're referring to the azimuth we place the sun for the hillshade? If so, it varies, though it is almost always coming from the top, generally from the upper left. Exactly where it is coming from depends on the terrain, we'll move it around within a 45 degree window around 337.5 and see what makes the particular landscape look best.

zestyping 5y ago

This printing technique would be absolutely stunning for electron micrographs, astrophotography, or terrain of other planets!

mparr4 5y ago
We've got mars and the moon on the site. I've been wanting to do some of the recently released Martian craters. They would look killer! I've never thought of electron micrographs but just did a google image search and wow, I have to agree!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gabereiser 5y ago

pretty awesome but the prices for a 30x40 are 10x the cost of my own prints at that size on the same material.

mparr4 5y ago
We sell wall art. You likely don't look at a painting by your favorite artist and say "This is overpriced. I bet the canvas and paint only cost $10." Also, Ramble Maps is a business. We have material costs, shipping costs, advertising costs, rent. We accept returns (and pay for return shipping), spend time making maps, answering emails, and writing posts like this. And finally, can you let me know where you can get those materials? Those prices are far better than what we pay!
- gabereiser 5y ago
  Yeah, no disrespect, I understand you're a business. For example, someone with a little bit of knowledge of GIS and some google skills could create an image of GMTED2010 data and upload it to a printing service for around $260 for a 30"x40". Those with access to printers could do it for about 1/2 that with the right sublimation gear or large format inkjets. I was comparing your 30x45 with 30x40 prints I do of my own works. Granted it's not flyover LiDAR, its space art, but still. I'm not your target customer, but I do wish you the best.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

Nevermark 5y ago

The author states that at 300dpi they cannot perceive any loss of detail with 20/15 vision. But a higher standard would be if at any distance, they cannot perceive a difference between 300 and 400dpi. Maybe the result would be the same, maybe that was even tested, but when I hear something is the best of the best I am going to look for even a tiny window of improvement!