The OpenStreetMap “Streets Clock”
Thursday, November 26th, 2009After the success of our Earth product series we naturally learned a lot about what is emotionally important to people. Among other things people associate feelings and memories with places. I seemed natural to us to build upon the idea of the Earth series using street maps. We had to overcome a number of hurdles to accomplish the result you can see today.
Streets Clock in Maple Wood
Proprietary Data
The map interfaces most people are accustomed to using like those from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! use proprietary data. This means that we can’t create any derivative works from them. This is where the OpenStreetMap comes in. The OpenStreetMap is licensed under a Creative Commons license that enables us to take and remix the data. OpenStreetMap does not yet contain every street, building and point of interest but anyone can enter data into the system. Please consider entering some data from you local area. Find out how.
Streets Clock Design Interface
Non-Realtime Data Access
Due to the large amount of data in the OpenStreetMap we can not retrieve the data in real-time. The solution we came up with was to perform some image processing of the pre-rendered map images. We cut out certain aspects of the map based on their color. This enables visitors to our website to get a preview of how their clock will look in real-time.
Production Files
The laser cutter that cuts the final clock shape out of wood or acrylic glass needs a vector file. A vector file is defined by lines and curves whereas a bitmap file, like in the real-time preview, is defined by the colors of the files pixels. The vector file can be scaled but the bitmap file can not. Whilst the preview might look fine on the screen, it is not suitable for laser cutting at the scale of the clock. Each pixel would be visible and the curves would never be as smooth as with the vector files. When generating the vector file we also remove pieces of information that are not necessary such as street names, transport routes and administrative district borders. This creates a more iconographic image. In future we may look at offering the engraving of street names on the streets. At present this is not automated and can not be offered for one-off pieces. For large orders we can look at manual customization of the geometry and engraving. To produce the final production file a designer, either myself or Hannes, turns certain layers on or off to produce a result that reaches our aesthetic standards and contains the most relevant information in geometric form.
Complexity and Laser Speed
The more complex a form the longer it takes to cut out the clock. Our laser cutter is very fast and powerful and allows us to keep production of unique pieces down to an affordable price whilst producing a beautiful end result.
What is Next
It is too early for me to say what the future has in store for the Streets concept but give the amazing initial response you can be assured there are more products to come. Please send us you feedback, both good and bad, so that we can keep improving the Streets products and design interfaces to make them as simple and elegant as possible.
and the Streets Clock which we launched a few days ago.
