What is the state of active research in cartography? Map making used to be one of the most prized technical skills and I was wondering where the field is moving.
First thing that came to mind was new d3 transform...
I was exposed to hundreds of map projections in school, so I'm still kind of trying to figure out what the novelty is here. It just looks like a Japan-centrerd equal-area projection. The tetrahedron is kind of neat. Projections are generally planar, cylindrical, or conical. By using a mosaic of planes, I imagine the formula for this projection would be unbelievably complex, making it much less general purpose.
When you want to represent a spheroid on a 2d surface, you have to distort one or more of shape, area, direction, distance. The objective when selecting a projection is to understand the intended purpose and audience.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say the relevance here is the exploration of what projections we most commonly use and if they're still the best choices for today's purposes and audiences.
I would love to see what Tissot's indicatrix looks like for this projection.
You make it sound as if it's unusual. Of course they prefer Japan in the middle, they're in Japan! Just like Brits (I presume) have a huge love for Britain-centered maps. I'll bet not a single world map in British textbooks has the world cut in the Atlantic.
I am not sure about other countries but European maps are always oriented for north. Which works fine when you read them in book, but not necessarily when you are looking at big guide map on the street. Yes, sure, this map may show red "you are here" mark, but it is still difficult to find out your way as a map itself is always oriented to north, while you may not be.
Japanese street maps are oriented on you (most of them). When you're standing in front of it - "up" on map always means "go forward". Which might be confusing at the beginning, if you came from Europe. But the more you look at them, the more easy it is to find your way.
http://www.wdwmagic.com/attractions/disneys-hollywood-studio...
I'm usually working in an EPSG code, and of the 4,000+ EPSG codes I probably use 10 regularly and perhaps have used 100 in my lifetime (if anything, that's an overestimate). They are designed this way, most of them simply represent a small area of the earths surface well. Since I primarily work in the Northeast United States, I don't need to use a whole lot of them.
I'm playing loose with terms here, the EPSG codes are really 'spatial references' made up of various 'projections' and 'coordinate systems' and 'datums' and etc. I usually find it easier to just talk about spatial references because they are so commonly used as a shortcut approach as opposed to individually selecting the attributes that make up the spatial references.
Cartography includes an incredible wide body of work, defined largely by the data sets being used, the audience/purpose of the display, and the medium.
For example, if we narrow our focus to just models of the actual world this includes surveys, navigation programs, hiking maps, remote sensing rasters, etc. - all of which have very little overlap concerning data, audience, and medium.
I build geography products, but I'm not a researcher - hopefully someone with more research experience can chime in, but perhaps your questions is too broad given how deep various geography niches can run. I know I certainly haven't even started to answer your question.
Displaying state/country level data using EPSG:4326 isn't great, thankfully it doesn't happen often.
http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/ScaleAdaptiveWebMapProjec...