Visualizing the World’s Population in 3D

Have you heard about a project called Human Terrain? It is a platform by Matt Daniels that presents the world’s population in a rather unique and cool way, in 3D. Basically, this is an astonishing website where you can see how the population changed over the years in different parts of the world. 

The project is said to wield data from Global Settlement Layer, which relies on “satellite imagery, census data, and volunteered geographic information” when creating population density maps. 

Please note that you must be careful when using this data for research purposes as there is a number of caveats. Make sure to read this paper in the Journal of Maps by Duncan Smith to learn more. 

The data here is processed with the help of Google Earth Engine (you can find an example script here).

The developer states that the whole visualization was inspired by Alasdair Rae’s blog posts on how to visualize snapshots of the data. 

You can find a more detailed explanation here.