Spatial Games

Lets face it, games are fun. Everyone likes to play games of some sort be it sports or board games or card games or what ever kind of games you're into. Some games are solely meant for amusement, others can be educational, others can be physical or some combination of all three. What is another thing most people like to play with? Technology of course! People like to fidle with things, take things apart just to put them back together and see if it will still work. One type of game that encompasses all of these things is Geo poker. Old fashion card game gone tech! You dwonload a list of GPS points to find containers, sometimes physical, sometimes virtual, to get a code. You enter the code on the website and get a card, once you get a full hand, it's just old fashion poker. This game is just fun because poker is a fun card game, educational because it get people hands on experience with GPS and finding points, it can be physical because you have to get outside to find the physical containers and it's using GPS technology.

mapping technology

Mapping technology. What does it mean? Does it mean the technology used to create maps or is it making maps of technology? I'll cover all the bases and and discuss both topics.
The technology that is used to make maps has made map making much easier. Early maps had to be hand drawn making them hard to reproduce so the only people with maps were those with the money to pay people to draw them or the need for maps to navigate by. The invention of the printing press made the reproduction of maps possible so they became more available to the general public. Maps may have been reproducable but they're accuracy still depended on the people making the observations and measurements. With space technologies taking off, sattilites were able to take detailed photographs of large area of the planet that could be used for map making but a reference system was still needed. The launch of a constilation of satilites enabled a grid to be placed over the Earth that satilites could use to return a set of possition coordinates in a number of refrence systems like UTM to a user on Earth via a GPS unit.

Making a map of technology could be just about anything since most things in life today show some level of technology. This is a map showing wireless network coverages for example

3D cartography

Computer technology has had a profound impact on the types of maps that can be created
and the methods used to create them. One example is the use of three dimensional technology to create a vitual landscape. In the past elevation had to be represented on a two dimensional plane by representing elevations with lines, or contours. Now with the use of GPS and GIS, Digital Elevation Models (DEM) can be created to represent the world in three dimensions. Google Earth, Windows Live, and World Wind all use three dimensional mapping to create maps that are fun to look at and play around with.

Old maps vs. New maps

Maps and the technology used to make them has changed drastically over the years. Old maps were hand drawn from data acquired by field notes and/or observations. These maps would be very simple in design yet take hours or days to create. Because they were hand drawn and took a lot of skill and talent to create, many old maps can be considered works of art. Gone are the days of maps taking a long time to create by a select few people. With satellite data, GPS, GIS, and any number of other computer based technologies, maps can now be created by just about anyone with a computer and internet access. Some would argue that because of the ability to mass produce maps, they are no longer and art form. I disagree. All that has changed is the medium of the artist and the skill he or she must posses in order to create maps that stand out from the everyday map.