There exists many meth­ods for geo­vi­su­al­iza­tion of spa­tial phe­nom­ena. As talked about a few weeks ago, pop­u­la­tion den­sity can be mapped out using car­tograms, or by other more clas­si­cal meth­ods, such as the chloro­pleth and dot den­sity tech­niques. Another method is shown below, whereby pop­u­la­tion den­sity is explored as a 3-dimensional poly­gon extru­sion. This has been com­pleted using Arc­Globe with ESRI basic world population-by-state data. Have a look at the video below!

It works best on a slow con­nec­tion if you buffer the video first.

I’ve added a hyp­so­met­ric colour­ing scheme to help empha­size the dif­fer­ences in pop­u­la­tion den­sity val­ues, and specif­i­cally, to cre­ate sep­a­ra­tion between low and high values.

Cheers!