NACIS 2024

Animating Maps with Adobe After Effects
Sarah Bell, Esri
Animated map graphics have become a ubiquitous part of media production. Documentaries, advertisements, and even fictional television shows have been using Adobe After Effects to create map animations to visually aid their stories. From flight routes, to tsunami waves, to rotating globes, the possibilities are endless. In this talk, I will share tips that I've learned by turning my static map graphics into animations with Adobe After Effects.

Mapping Light and Shadow on Mount Everest
Carl Churchill, The Wall Street Journal
Mount Everest has developed a mountaineering industry built around summiting the highest peak on earth. This industry has had to adapt to changing climactic conditions on the route, as the glacier that hikers on the southern, or Nepali, route, rely on has been gradually collapsing. As part of a year-long graphics project for The Wall Street Journal, I constructed a 3D model of Everest with open-source tools and combined detailed reporting with simulated physical conditions to portray to our readers how Everest expeditions must race against a melting glacier to reach the top.

Visualizing Change: How Map Design Shapes Our Views on Glacier Retreat 
Fangsheng (Jasper) Zhou, University of Oregon
This presentation explores the emotional and perceptual impacts of 2D versus 3D map designs on viewers' understanding of glacier retreat due to climate change. Utilizing the South Cascade Glacier as a case study, this research examines how different visual representations can influence public perceptions and emotional responses to environmental changes. Through a user study involving a diverse group of participants, the study aims to highlight the effectiveness of map design in communicating complex geographic information and raising awareness about the pressing issue of climate change.

Canyon Cartography
Brandon Plewe, Brigham Young University
Over the years, a great deal of research has been done and dozens of techniques have been developed for portraying the beautiful and rugged landscape of mountains. Much less time has been spent on their counterpart, canyons; especially landscapes that feature rocky cliffs and canyons without mountains, such as the Colorado Plateau in the Southwestern United States. We experimented with existing and new techniques that can be composited to create maps of canyonlands that emphasize their ruggedness and beauty, and help visitors more effectively understand and travel through them.

Introducing Tiled Texture Shading
Leland Brown, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal
Texture shading is an algorithm to enhance visual detail in canyons, ridges, and structural features of a terrain. But suppose you want a seamless map of a very large area. If you divide the map into tiles and texture shade each one separately, the tiles won't match properly at the edges. Until now, the only solution was to process the entire dataset as a unit, potentially needing more time or memory space than you have available. Now the algorithm has been extended to process tiles individually while taking into account their context in the surrounding map. The result is texture-shaded tiles that fit together seamlessly into a single image. This makes texture shading practical even on datasets of 100,000 x 100,000 pixels or larger.