World's 'most accurate map' challenges popular wisdom

CAIRO – 24 August 2017: Apparently, we have been all wrong about how our own continents look; or at least that is the conclusion drawn by the Authagraph World Map project. The brainchild of designer Hajime Narukawa, the map was awarded as winner of the 'Good Design Grand Award', Japan's biggest design competition, back in 2016.

The world map we are all familiar with is based on the Mercator projection, a cylindrical projection created in 1569 by Gerardus Mercator for use in ship navigation. While helpful for those purposes, it actually makes some pretty large errors, such as shrinking down Africa and over sizing Greenland. Creating an accurate world map is not easy of course, since you need to figure out a way to transfer the details of our spherical planet into a flat 2D map.

Narukawa's Authagraph got around this with a rather clever method; by taking an actual globe and dividing it into 96 triangles, which are then projected into a tetrahedron. That tetrahedron could then be folded out into a rectangle, creating a flattened version of the globe that is more accurate than any projection so far.