| This is really nice art and data visualization too. It's common to scale the elevation of a topographic map to exaggerate features [1], even non-linearly [2]. If you try to 3d print a raised relief globe without exaggeration it is surprisingly flat. If you're buying an expensive classroom globe, the specs talk about the exaggeration [2]. This is a sculpture, so whatever goes, but perhaps the designer looked at the version without exaggeration and noticed that it looked less emphatic. I also think, as data visualization, this sculpture nicely shows the extreme change in price which occurs over small spatial distances. That's really important, and, actually, the tendency to make real estate price heatmaps with models that force continuity and prefer smoothness, like cubic splines, suppresses that aspect of the data. Railroad tracks and some beautification really are sometimes the only thing between million dollar homes and mobile parks. It would be cool to see this with neighborhood boundaries/names on the mesh. [1] "A raised-relief map or terrain model is a three-dimensional representation, usually of terrain, materialized as a physical artifact. When representing terrain, the vertical dimension is usually exaggerated by a factor between five and ten; this facilitates the visual recognition of terrain features." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised-relief_map [2] "Raised Relief: Yes. Elevations from 0-3,280 feet are magnified 60 times, higher elevations and ocean floor are exaggerated by 40 times." http://www.1worldglobes.com/1WorldGlobes/classroom_relief_gl... |