Mapping My University
Learning how to map on OpenStreetMap and making a 3d map of my university.
— 2 min read
Table of Contents
Yesterday
I realized that I haven't written in a while, I've just not really been around to it I guess.
Yesterday, and for the past week, I've been doing nothing but learning Chinese, programming some important projects, and learning how to skate switch. I got pretty bored of it all and decided to temporarily depart from it.
So, last night, I got really into maps. I thought about making a 3d map of my university. Long time ago I got inspired by a Shinjuku Terminal indoor 3d map. This got me so excited that I cooked up a quick project and started working on it.
Today
I feel like today I made a lot of progress on the project.
View it at https://upmap.rin.dev.
I got the map data from OpenStreetMap. I didn't really like the data very much and I had more plans for the project, but the data wasn't good enough. So, I decided to look into contributing to OpenStreetMap and improving the data myself.
It was so trivially easy to get started. I created an account, and started adding some things that weren't on the map. I also fixed up some wrong things.
I thought it was crazy because when I looked on other map websites, I saw the changes I made. OSM seems to be used by other software and websites for data which was really cool.
EPSG:4326
When I rendered the map data, the map looked weird. All the angles were off with no right angles—they were either acute or obtuse. I found that the map data was in EPSG:43261—the standard coordinate system used by the entire world, and in this case, used by OSM. In my other project, I'm using EPSG:209362 or UTM so I thought I was familiar with these kind of things. No.
I realized that I had just stumbled upon an age old problem in cartography of projecting a 3d sphere onto a 2d plane. I had to transform all the coordinates to EPSG:38573.
This worked and the map looked great :)