Burj Khalifa Dubai Map Extravaganza

The blur between map fiction and reality is changing. Years ago, we had the option of a physical atlas or your imagination. The world has changed and we are able to view the world in different ways. Satellite imagery of areas is readily available and detailed mapping have been brought to market by consumers such as Bing, Google and soon Apple, with their announcement of Apple Maps. Flyover looks exciting! And so does user generated maps. Openmaps is a great mapping product available for everyone and for everyone to contribute. When Google Streetview (only available in some cities) is also exciting and when it first came out, everyone was gagging to see their own home. There were concerns about privacy, but Streetview game changing - and so is this new wave of consumer mapping. Understanding your context for the layman is more an more important, whether it's to facebook checkin or to tag and geolocate their data or position. Cartographers (those people that make maps) will probably be either super excited or overly angry about what's happening. But to Joe Public,  it's exciting. What's also exciting is a new wave of photography or bold photographers who are taking some amazing shots at amazing places - and then using Photoshop to make it even more so! Map Mashups,  Apps and other such things are making this space very exciting. And so, with Bing Maps updating their satellite imagery , we thought it useful to look at a place in the world, that didn't really exist in the old days of mapping - Burj Khalifa, Dubai's tallest building:

Let's look at Bing first:

It's fairly simple, but you see their new edition with satellite imagery and it's a little more impressive:

Yes, it's more than impressive.

We have the official map from the Dubai Government:

 - clear, fun and simple.

The Open Street Map does what it was supposed to do:

and it's not bad considering it is open sourced!

The Google maps range from amusing to great. This first one, pitches Burj Khalifa in a warped way, not really as a the tallest image in the world:

But the mapping it pretty damn good and it's what you're used to. And it gets better with its openGL version:

You can see that the Burj has grown somewhat. But the Google Earth version is pretty damn amazing:

if you have google earth, you can even fly in...almost.

But the reality looks even more amazing if you look at GeoEye's satelllite photo:

And you can see that the reality from closer up is very similar with this photo from Stephanie Compoint

as these two also show:

And it's also interesting looking at the original plan of the Burj Khalifa (then named Burj Dubai)

and from Emaar's brochures:

For map geeks, it's an interesting time - we look forward to see if the Burj Khalifa will appear on Apple Maps on ios6 - and indeed whether anyone else steps into the mapping game.

With global connectivity increasing at pace, in a few years, you may not even need a physical map. But in the mean time, we can still dream.

Burj Khalifa - At the top

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