Land Lines is a fun project that will match any line you draw to a real map

By Luke Dormehl Published December 23, 2016

Satellite images have mapped every visible surface of the Earth in immense detail. Using that as the raw data for an intriguing experiment, developers Zach Lieberman and Matt Felsen developed an intriguing project which lets you draw any shaped line you want in your web browser and have it magically matched up to an identical river, highway or coastline somewhere in the world.

There is also a “drag” option, making it possible for users to follow a never-ending road which traces its way along curves and patterns across the entire globe.

Recommended Videos

Called Land Lines, the results are pretty much a fun time waster — which, of course, is nothing you’d be interested in during the last working day before the holidays. However, there is something undeniably hypnotic and addictive about the concept.

The interesting part about Land Lines is the computer science behind it, though. It was created using a combination of OpenCV Structured Forests and ImageJ’s Ridge Detection, which analyzes and identifies the dominant visual lines in a database of more than 50,000 images.

The satellite images are taken from Google Earth and — through a combination of machine learning, data optimization, and graphics card power — these can be quickly searched in your web browser without you having to sit around all day waiting for a match for your doodle to be found in some obscure stretch of beach in Madagascar.

If you want to find out more about the project from this perspective, you can do so at this page, where Lieberman and Felson lay out some of their secrets, or over on GitHub where they make the source code available.

Now if you will excuse us, we have to get back to drawing wiggly lines that look like a river in Florida … we mean, finishing a really important spreadsheet about something business-related.

Former Contributor

I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Scammers are teaching AI to sound like you, and research says our brains are falling for it

Has your accent just become a security vulnerability? AI scammers are getting too good at sounding local

Scammers are turning trusted news brands into investment traps

The next scam call you receive may not sound like a robot, a call center, or even someone pretending to be your relative. AI voice generators have become capable of reproducing regional accents and dialects that sound convincing enough that researchers are warning they could become a potent social-engineering tool.

For example, a scammer could use an accent familiar to a targeted community to make a suspicious call sound considerably more trustworthy.

Emerging Tech

Scientists found a way to turn plastic bottles into cookies you can actually eat

hand holding a cookie

Plastic bottles and cookies rarely show up in the same sentence, but a team of researchers just gave us a reason to talk about both together. According to Science Daily, scientists at Southern Illinois University Carbondale have engineered yeast that can turn waste from plastic bottles and old crop leftovers into real food ingredients and create cookies.

The work began as part of a NASA program exploring how astronauts might produce their own food during deep space missions, since resupply runs from Earth aren't exactly realistic that far out. The researchers' big insight was simple: plastic bottles are packed with carbon, and so, as it turns out, is food. That single connection became the foundation for everything that followed.

Computing

Students who use AI every day may be falling behind, while moderate users pull ahead

New global testing data suggests more AI in the classroom isn't automatically better.

I assumed more AI access might help students learn faster. However, a new OECD study dispels that misconception for me and everyone else who gave their children a paid version of AI chatbots, thinking it would help them through their educational journey.

According to PISA 2025 data from 760,000 students in 91 countries, students who use AI daily score meaningfully worse on standardized tests than their peers. The full picture is more complicated than a simple ban would fix.