1. Space and its Dimensions

The History of 3D

The very first known maps presenting objects and phenomenon using cartographic symbols date from 2.500 years B.C. One of these maps is the famous map of Mesopotamia.

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Mesopotamia
Presentation of Map of Mesopotamia.
Source: Commission on Mountain Cartography, 2006

This map is a combination of two different views:

Following the development of cartographic design throughout the Greek and Roman era, we realise that cartographers have always wanted to represent the relief as realistic as possible, using mostly perspective drawings of hills and mountains.

After the stagnation of development in the Middle Ages, a renaissance of cartography during the 15th century brought about a continuation of perspective presentations. We had to wait until the 18th century before the first relief representations showing morphological forms in an orthographic way could be introduced. Have a look…




The first method called 'hatching' indeed enabled some basic measurement tasks, like determination of slope, but a big disadvantage of the method was extreme graphical overloading.


In the late 19th century, contours became the most common way of relief presentation at all large scale maps, since this was the only method that enabled full map measurements and exact definition of every point's height on the map.

Consequently, orthographic maps became predominant in the 20th century. A minority of perspective maps was still produced but mainly for touristic purposes.

To summarise, we can see that orthographic maps dominated our history only during the last 200 years, while perspective type maps which are more adequate to normal people's viewing have been used for thousands of years.


Article: Analysis of user's response on 3D cartographic presentations by Dušan Petrovič and Polona Mašera.