What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets of Antwerp, where merchants navigated the sprawling city with woodcut maps. Or sailors plotting Atlantic crossings with accuracy unheard of for the time. This whimsical intersection of history and tech was recently featured in a blog post by [Jan Adriaenssens], and comes alive with Bert Spaan’s Allmaps Here: a delightful web app that overlays your GPS location onto georeferenced historical maps.
Take Antwerp’s 1565 city map by Virgilius Bononiensis, a massive 120×265 cm woodcut. With Allmaps Here, you’re a pink dot navigating this masterpiece. Plantin-Moretus Museum? Nailed it. Kasteelpleinstraat? A shadow of the old citadel it bordered. Let’s not forget how life might’ve been back then. A merchant could’ve avoided morning traffic and collapsing bridges en route to the market, while a farmer relocating his herd could’ve found fertile pastures minus the swamp detour.
Unlike today’s turn-by-turn navigation, a 16th-century GPS might have been all about survival: avoiding bandit-prone roads, timing tides for river crossings, or tracking stars as backup. Imagine explorers fine-tuning their Atlantic crossings with trade winds mapped to the mile. Georeferenced maps like these let us re-imagine the practical genius of our ancestors while enjoying a modern hack on a centuries-old problem.
Although sites like OldMapsOnline, Google Earth Timelapse (and for the Dutch: TopoTijdreis) have been around for a while, this new match of technology and historical detail is a true gem. Curious to map your own world on antique charts? Navigate to Allmaps and start georeferencing!
Older maps have distortions compared to reality. (Surveying was hard. Heck, even the vectorized USGS map in my pre-smartphone GPS receiver has obvious near-misses). What would be most fun would be to semi-automatically account for this so your glowing dot look like it’s faithfully following the streets. This “un-distortion” would mathematically map from modern, super-accurate coordinates to the old map’s “reality distortion field.” (Steve Jobs would be proud).
Open-cv supports lens distortion correction. I used that to correct fish eye distortion. It might work on distorted/warped maps too. Maybe bi-linear interpolation.
This would be essentially the same as georeferencing an old map onto the GPS datum (warping it until it fits reality)), but then using the inverse of that transformation to map a point form the GPS datum onto the undistorted old map. IIRC you can do this in QGIS with ‘Vector Bender’.
read Michael Pye, great book, Antwerp: the Glory Years
I don’t know exactly why, but this brought back memories of watching that one episode of ST:VOY in which the hologram of da Vinci had been captured.
Wasn’t there a short dialog happening between two crew members about the maps drawn by da Vinci beeing surprinsingly accurate?
here in the netherlands, we have https://topotijdreis.nl where you can scroll thourgh 200 years of maps and see what was there on a specific spot earlier or how cities grew.
Wait, cities? In the swamp lands? How!? 😁
Considering how much land reclamation you guys have done I assume that site gives you a lot of pictures of fish.
Alternatively you could use a GAN to do style transfer and make a dimensionally-accurate 16th-century
map, but that’s a little less fun…
Would be interesting to see it with the Piri Reis map, distorted enough to have hallucinatory islands and coasts, some mythical locations, and the tip of South America is joined with Antarctica so that the continents are impassible into the Pacific:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map