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Very cool. Even the building-by-building graphics seem to be correct: a boxy version of my house in Yokohama is in the correct location and has the correct height relative to its neighbors. The map also shows—correctly—that it is raining at this moment in Tokyo but not in Yokohama.

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You can (most likely!) thank the OSM project for the building footprint and height data (along with pretty much all the street data in this map).

I've recently been playing with shademap.app and it's pretty incredible for planning a solar panel install. Google Earth has always been able to show you shadows for any given time of day, but only for natural features (mountains, hills, generally the shape of the earth), but doesn't take into account buildings. Shademap is using OSM building data to calculate buildings as well.

Thanks for the shoutout. Shademap is actually really popular with the Japanese and a subset of them use it to plan photography of...trains [1]. It's a fascinating subculture I didn't even know existed.

[1] https://rail-log.net/photospot

I’m currently visiting Tokyo and found the building where I’m staying too. This is so cool!

I’ve enjoyed seeing the buses move around on Google maps too. And all the bus times are so accurate at the stops. I wish every city made all this data available.

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