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Shriveling world project

A scientific blog provides outputs and analysis of the time-space relief cartographic representation model.

Support and grants

Funds have been used to support the code development of the project.

• The project has benefited from funding from the laboratory LVMT in 2018 and 2019
• The project has benefited from a BQR grant funding from Université Paris Est Marne la Vallée in 2019
• The project has benefited from a 12 month engineer position under the project ELSAT 2020 funded by Région Hauts-de-France and European Union

General architecture of the project

The shriveling world project needs a three dimensional framework. After having studied, and then moved away from, the opportunities of Cesium, we chose to mobilize the framework of https://threejs.org/.

We chose to use TypeScript as a more structured approach to coding than simple javascript. This allows to better support collaborative development, and allows to produce modern documentation.

In order to ease the collaborative work on the project, and in order to deal with the complexity of the project, we chose to use TSLint for rigor and readability.

Renaming the project

Shriveling world being too long and not easy to remember, it may be nice to adopt a more sexy name for the project, here are some ideas:

• GeoTimeSpace
• GeoShrivel
• GeoWarp

This idea of renaming the project has been abandoned in 2020. Following the suggestion of @phbrbr we decided to keep the word 'shriveling' to name the project, in order to retain the thickness it conveys. In order to explain this word, it is necessary to tell a nice intellectual story.

Install on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 machine

Execute the following instruction:

• sudo apt update
• sudo apt install chromium-browser
• sudo apt install curl
• curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | sudo -E bash -
• sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
• npm install node
• sudo npm install -g npm@next
• sudo npm cache clean -f
• sudo npm install -g n
• sudo n stable
• sudo apt install git
• sudo npm install gulp -g
• cd Documents
• git clone https://github.com/theworldisnotflat/shriveling_world.git
• cd shriveling_world/
• sudo npm i (the first time only, then simply npm i)
• npm run build
• gulp run dev

Then open in browser this adress http://localhost:8080.

Roadmap

Tasks

• Use a database of cities with population since 1950 from the United Nations World Urban Prospects database.

• Showing cities as cones with top of cone at the chorotaxic position of the city, and slope determined by the ratio of maximum speed and terrestrial transport speed.

• Spheric earth representation

• Plan representation with a projection respecting distances. The choice of the projection should result from a compromise between two criteria:

  • respect distances

  • stay close to the conventional representation of the earth, because the relief already disrupts shapes.

• Historic time. The speed of transport modes varies along time. And new transport modes emerge. This has to be dealt with in the application. This is included in a separate csv file.

• Export scene to blender

• change camera to the orthographic projection, so that perspective do not modify graphical distances

• Development of transport networks visualisation. Should allow drawing great circle arcs for fast, long distance aerial OD pairs. But is is also necessary to draw longer arcs, up in the air with a length of the arc proportional to the time spent (this is the basis of the model)

• Interface to input files (in complement to the drag'n'drop)

• Extruding continents/countries. This step aims at cutting the group of cones at the shoreline. Cones represent terrestrial time-space and hence do not extend on seas and oceans. This approach also makes it possible to produce country maps.

• Generate a single surface from the cones (cleaning up the down side of the merged cones), or a thin volume

• Time-scale. Each view of the shrivelled earth model is associated with a time-scale. This time-scale should evolve when zooming and de zooming and when changing epoch.

• Names of cities with a threshold on the population size of cities. Cities hidden by the globe should not show on the image.

• Treatment of oceans and seas. They belong to the time-space by means of navigation. There is a speed there, very slow nowadays, but was not that slow in ancient times. In the present time-space, the slope will be very steep.

• The possibility to draw complex cones

• draw cones as "horse saddles" cf issue #66

Ideas for future developments

• Colour the cones with a gradient from altitude zero to centre of earth in order to highlight the best accessible locations (clear) to less accessible (dark) to and from cities