Strabo's Profile

The discussion of the value & ethics of what Clement Valla is doing here is interesting, but as a geographer I just can't resist being pedantic about one point from the original post...

Most of the distortion present in these images is not really a result of the "effort to convert 3D space to a 2D screen."

Instead it results from taking an image, originally captured to a 2D image plane (the image sensor or old-school camera film in a satellite, aircraft, balloon, etc.) from a single aerial perspective point, and transforming (stretching, warping, compressing, etc.) it to match the 3D model of the terrain underlying the image area.

It's a minor point, given that 3D-->2D transformation distortion is indeed a big part of what's involved here, as the poster said, but given that I'm usually just gawking at the photos on AT and thinking "I wish I had those design skills," I thought I'd chime in with some corrective details where I could.

Note that there can also be also oddities that occur along the edges of where aerial images (taken from different perspectives) meet when displayed as in Google Earth/Maps.