Saturday, January 1, 2011

FedEx Experience - Interactive Data Maps

FedEx, a company that employed me for almost seven years, has a really neat interactive data map. The FedEx 3D Experience is an interactive map that changes the shape and size of countries in response to the data sets you select. There are twenty-one data categories and each category has three different data sets within it. For example, if I select the data category "household appliances" I'll be able to see a mapped representation of television imports, refrigerator imports, and washing machine imports by country. If you don't want to select data sets you can just let the map autoplay through all of the data sets and watch the map change as it goes through each data set.

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the great find.

Applications for Education
The FedEx 3D Experience is a good way to see country by country comparisons of interesting data sets. Some of the categories of data, like "household appliances," are a little more relatable to students than the GDP, GNP type of data sets often found in maps like this.