About GeoTron

GeoTron 5000 has dedicated his artificial life to comparing one place to another. How tiny would Rhode Island look if someone plopped it on top of Brazil? Is Texas really bigger than the Yukon? How does the shape of that place we've never been compare to the shape of the place where we are now? With a nimble computer brain that pulls data from the best Geographic Information Systems on planet Earth, our out-of-this-world friend GeoTron uses the most accurate maps and statistics to satisfy your geo-quizzicisms.

GeoTron will be the first to tell you that there are lots of options and tradeoffs when it comes to representing three-dimensional Earth on a flat, two-dimensional map. Steve Waterman's poem introduces some of the issues: http://www.watermanpolyhedron.com/worldmap.html. GeoTron also loves this classic xkcd comic, which provides a psychological profiling of preferences: http://xkcd.com/977/.

What should GeoTron's depictions preserve? Latitude, land area, relative rotation, jars of fruit? Since the whole point of GeoTron is to get a visual feel for the relative sizes of different places, he uses a set of "equal area projections" for the images, and he bases his calculations for the textual comparisons on land area.

We hope you download and enjoy our mappy little robot, and we hope you'll show him off to all of your friends. Map on!

Screenshots

Click or tap on the center image to cycle through the different screenshots.







Contact Us

If you have trouble with or questions about GeoTron, drop an e-mail to help@believeinsciencesoftware.com. We'll do our best to get you an answer right away.

GeoTron is developed by:

Sam Bloomquist
President & Co-founder of Believe in Science Software
Sam is an iPhone developer, rubyist, new dad, runner, and sworn enemy of bureaucracy. He hails from the Circle City but loves people in all geolocations.
Kelly Johnston
Geographic Information Systems Specialist at the University of Virginia Library Scholars' Lab
Kelly resides in Virginia but feels at home in many places. He has a strong affinity for his wife's homemade pumpkin pie.

Special help from UVa's Todd Burks and the rest of the Believe in Science Software crew:

Jeff DeBolt, Co-founder and CFO
Shannon Bloomquist, Marketing & Communications
Staci DeBolt, Art & Design

Other Work by Believe in Science Software

We spend most of our time working on our own software ideas at Believe in Science, but we occasionally do a little consulting. We always enjoy hearing about new ideas, so drop us a line if you need help bringing a new idea to life or would just appreciate a little friendly advice about the iOS market. Past projects include:

Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project

Indianapps: The future green infrastructure of Indianapolis

http://www.dandavisart.com/

http://www.bidpalnetwork.com/

Voices of the Earth