YouTube has a truly remarkable set of videos made by displaying a map as it changes over time.
Check out, for instance, this Map of the Western Front
They’re great as is, but they have some limitations.
- It’s hard to stop and examine details
- It’s not very natural to use the scrubber bar to scrub thru them
- they aren’t that detailed anyway
- it’s very difficult to annotate changes as they occur – e.g. ‘that change was the anschluss’
So, rez a goodly sized mega. Texture it with the media texture. Download one of these movies and stretch it way out in a video editor (change the frame rate down so it doesn’t balloon in size).
Now do some scripting to play the thing, stopping to have an ‘annotation’ pop up.
Alternatively, run the video out as as frames, pick out the relevant ones, and use two megas and changing alphas to make a ‘slide show dissolve’ effect between successive slides.
You can also find sites like this one that gives maps of europe at various times and use the above two megas method.
This would be a great thing for a canned kit. If enough people convince me to make one, I will.
Alternatively, and probably more efficiently, if some historians and geographers wanted to fund the project we could do this en masse for many subjects.
