I’m not a world traveller, and I’m unlikely to visit that many places around the globe. However the World Map is quite impersonal for my taste. So LEGO’s World Map is fairly clever, and I appreciate the efforts they made to make something that looks beautiful on a wall. In fact, one of the designers left a personal easter egg in the North Pacific using a few green tiles to represent the Chinese character “李”, which is Li, a common Chinese Surname. It’s probably better that way for artistic reasons anyway. So while it appears that the LEGO designers used the bathymetry as an inspiration, it’s not a strict correlation to any real data. The graph shows a general correlation, but it’s not as if the colours have been placed according to an exact formula.īeige tiles are more common close to sea-level, whereas Cyan, Teal, and Green tiles are more common below 3,500m. Below I’ve graphed the proportional frequency of each colour at a particular depth. Next I wondered if there was any direct correlation between the tile colours and exact bathymetry. For example, a few ridges don’t appear, like the one between Africa and Antarctica ( Southwest Indian Ridge), between Australia/Antarctica/New Zealand ( Southeast Indian Ridge), and the Central Indian Ridge. You’ll see some correlation along the mid-ocean ridges, though there are some spots that don’t quite match up. I also wondered if there was a correlation between the tile colours and the sea depth.īelow is a comparison of the LEGO tiles and a grayscale image of the sea depth, projected using my custom algorithm I made above. You can see a comparison of the actual LEGO tiles with my attempted projection below. For instance, Hawaii appears twice as large, the British Isles are larger than usual, and the Gulf of Mexico was made smaller. In addition to major shifts and transformations, there are also a few other niche design decisions. The animation below shows the transformations I used to convert a WGS-84 projection to the projection used in the LEGO World Map. Additionally, increasing the space for sea-tiles makes the map a lot more colourful! □ It’s not clear why they did this, but I can only guess that not-shifting Antarctica would result in a massive white-tiled area at the bottom of the map that most customers wouldn’t find useful. So the latitudes appear to have shifted in weird ways. Antarctica is chopped off from the bottom, and there is a lot more arctic ocean than you typically see in a WGS-84 projection.But I like to think LEGO just wanted to make Billund, Denmark the centre of the world. A reasonable explanation for this is that LEGO wanted to avoid awkwardly chopping the Chukchi Peninsula in two, since it happens to passthrough the Anti-Meridian. Typically the world is centred on the 0° longitude, the Prime Meridian, but in this case the map is centred on Denmark.Sure it looks like a normal world map, but a few interesting design decisions were made: In other words, is there a geographic projection that describes the layout of the white tiles? Here’s a sneak peek of the answer to my third question, which you’ll find at the end of this post. However, as I was constructing it, I did have a few questions. Land tiles are in white and the bathymetry (sea depth) is represented using severalĭark blue tiles act as shadows for the land tiles to make the image pop. On the face of it, the design seems fairly simple. So I was very happy to finally see a set related to maps, especially something so visually stunning! I recommend reading the review on for more information.īelow is a picture of what it looks like, fully constructed. ![]() ![]() LEGO has been creating these mosaic sets for a while now, but usually they’ve just been pop-culture mosaics. In June 2021, the LEGO Group released 31203 World Map, a giant 65cm×104cm mosaic consisting of 1×1 round tiles.
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