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Comment by feral | Hacker News Reader

I'm not fully sure what the author is trying to say here.

Is it that a small screen isn't as good for looking at geographic information? If so, then I completely agree. But large tablet screens, touch surfaces, pico-projectors, etc will all come, and be cheap in time.

Is it that there's a high density of information on an atlas? Well, yes, there is - but this isn't necessarily a good thing. It can be hard to focus on the information that you want. A large LCD surface, where you can choose which layers you do and don't want, is surely better: maybe I just want to see contour and topo information, and don't want to see political boundaries.

Maps are awesome, and were great technology. But we're starting to see digital versions that will far exceed the paper ones in almost every way.

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At least in the short- to medium-term, it seems unlikely that we'll get tablet-like machines that are of a size to compare favorably even to a travel-size road atlas, much less a bookshelf or library atlas like in the OP. The physical size of it is useful because it can take up a larger portion of your field of vision, which better helps you get a sense of place within the mapped region. Even in a large browser on my 24" iMac I have a somewhat frustrating sense of looking through a too-small window that is blocking some of what I want to see. If I zoom out, I lose resolution.

So maybe eventually, but I don't think we're "starting to see" electronic atlases that uniformly exceed the paper variety. They are better in some ways and worse in some ways, and that will remain true for at least another couple decades, I think.

I don't know about that. For me personally electronic maps have enough advantages to completely replace the printed variey. That's with existing hardware.

It's often true: Perfect feature parity is not necessary to replace something. (Cars certainly don't have all the features of horses.) A few features that blow the old vareity out of the water are often enough. (I can think of a few: Price, accesibility, flexibilit, compactness.)

The Microsoft Surface is 107cm x 56cm. I haven't done it, but I'd say the experience of looking at at atlas on it, with multitouch zooming, and the ability to turn on and off layers, compares favorably to using a library atlas, like in the OP.

Is it compact and portable? No - but neither is a library atlas. How long before this sort of technology is common place? Or a wall projector and multitouch setup?

I don't know - but I strongly doubt it'll take decades. Decades is an awfully long time these days.

AIUI the display resolution of the Surface is 1024x768. That's not going to be even slightly like using a large atlas, no matter how big it is.

(A display that large with substantially more pixels, plus all the wonderful interactive things you can't do with paper, would be a fine thing indeed. But the Surface isn't it, at least not yet. Maybe there'll be a Surface 2 with much higher resolution?)

> which better helps you get a sense of place within the mapped region

Ability to Zoom in/out (and to lessor extent pan around) provides far greater sense of place.

maybe I just want to see contour and topo information, and don't want to see political boundaries.

well that's the thing - very few if any digital maps allow you to do simple things like this.

possibilities of digital cartography are much greater than paper one for sure, it's just that very few of them have materialized and gained widespread use yet.

You're obviously not into GIS. What you said may be true for commercial, largely deployed mapping. But isn't at all true about "Digital Cartography" as it exists today (actual as it existed for last couple decades).

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