BBC Dimensions
Matt Jones (British, born 1972),
Matt Brown (British, born 1980),
Tom Armitage (British, born 1982),
Matt Webb (British, born 1978),
Paul Mison (British, born 1974), and
Phil Gyford (British, born 1972)
of BERG (UK, est. 2005)
Max Gadney (British, born 1973)
of BBC (UK, est. 1922)
2010
Illustrator, Photoshop, SVG, HTML,
JavaScript, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and Google
Maps API software
The BBC Dimensions website takes
landmark events and phenomena and
superimposes them onto a satellite
view of any city, neighborhood, or area.
The Apollo 11 moon landing, for example,
an event of great historical significance,
covered an area smaller than the
average parking lot, and the 2010 floods
in Pakistan spanned a region equivalent
to half of the Eastern Seaboard of the
United States. Users pick from a series
of events, places, and things—from a
blueprint of the pyramids of Giza to the
area affected by the Battle of Stalingrad
to the depth of the Mariana Trench—and
type in a zip or postal code; the website
then generates a satellite image of the
area with the event outlined in yellow.
Some dimensions can be printed out as
directions for walks, for an even more
physical appreciation of the distances
involved. History and current events are
rendered more tangible and immediate,
bridging physical and conceptual distance.
Category: Worlds
Tags: Liminal Spaces / Maps / Visualizations / Interfaces
