Is the Earth/Map Projections concept still relevant

Question

As I was explaining to someone the concept of map projections (i.e., the act of projecting the earth sphere on to a flat sphere), I wondered this myself.

Considering now that devices are able to capture and represent the 3D shape of the Earth more accurately, how relevant is the map projections relevant.

The map projections could be used only when printing maps on to a flat paper.

Keen to hear from others.

Thanks, Thiru

Thiru_P · Answer

Thanks Melita for your practical advice.

I was thinking about representing the Earth's surface as close to the reality as possible on our screens  so when we measure a piece of land on the map, it equates exactly to the real-world measurement on Earth.

Now, I remember I came across this proposed Discrete Global Grid System http://geoawesomeness.com/discrete-global-grid-system-dggs-new-reference-system/  which gets implemented, we might do away with all the different map projections.

Thiru

MelitaKennedy · Answer

In general, there's no reason why you couldn't always store your data in latitude/longitude/height and only project it either on-the-fly for display or printing or make a copy that's in a projected coordinate reference system for analysis or whatever.

The biggest issue right now is that many algorithms used for analysis either don't have a 3D version implemented (sometimes due to complexity) AND/OR they're slow, often really slow, much slower than the equivalent 2D algorithm.

Even keeping all data in latitude/longitude/height, there's still a lot of different geographic and vertical coordinate reference systems out there so you would still need to reconcile these to use data layers together.

Melita