There’s a New Way to Explore the Outdoors: The New, Global FATMAP Is Coming Soon
Times spent exploring the outdoors are some of the most beautiful and rewarding we can experience - especially in today’s busy world.
But it’s not easy. Finding the right objective for the day requires gathering lots of information. Some of it is easy to find online but so much of it is tied up in local knowledge and analog resources. Knowing where and when to go and, more importantly, whether it’s in condition or safe can be hard and time consuming.
Finding Your Adventure
At FATMAP, our mission has always been to make it easier for people to find better, safer adventures. We spent the last three years building incredibly detailed 3D maps of the most popular mountain destinations and combining them with the best local knowledge we could find.
But no matter how many maps we produced, the number one request we got was “can you make a map for X?”.
Your adventures clearly don’t have boundaries, so why should our map?
We hear you.
You Asked For More Maps…
So we’ve gone a bit further and mapped the whole world.
We’re very excited to announce that in the coming weeks, we’ll release an update that will see FATMAP go from a collection of individual adventure destination maps to the first global 3D outdoor map built for adventure and exploration.
Every member of the FATMAP community (that’s someone with a FATMAP account) will get exclusive access in the first few weeks of its release. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up to the community by downloading the app (you can find all download links at the end of the article).
Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or just discovering us, here’s a sneak preview of what you can expect to see from the new map for the outdoors.
Information You Can Trust
With so much information out there, it’s hard to know what to look for and, indeed, who it was written for.
Our local expert community are all individuals who care about your safety and enjoyment when you’re visiting the places they know and love.
Made up of IFMGA guides, athletes and mountain professionals, you know you can both find and trust the information you’re looking for.
You’ll discover nearly 200 destination guides (and counting), from Chamonix to Grand Teton National Park to Niseko, written, moderated and updated by our local expert community. Every word goes through a moderation and editing process with a qualified professional and has resulted in an ever-growing community of like-minded people committed to accurate and quality outdoor guides.
The real power comes from combining these guides with the map, giving you the ultimate context and understanding.
The New Standard in Outdoor Mapping
Many years ago, the launch of Google Earth was groundbreaking. For the first time we were able to visualise the whole planet in 3D. It was a game changer to get an overview of a place, but when it came down to planning adventures at a local level, it often lacked the detail and features needed to be truly useful — accurate reference data for footpaths, valleys, passes, summits, rivers and terrain data detailed enough to make critical route choices or safety decisions was often missing.
We’ve built the technology for FATMAP from the ground up to create not just a 3D map but the World’s first global ‘outdoor map’ — the ultimate tool to help you discover, plan and navigate in the mountains.
Ultra-High-Detail
The ability to understand terrain in detail at a human scale relies on having very high resolution models of the world. We’ve used the very latest satellite technology to build a global map that’s almost 6 times higher resolution than any other global map available today.
And we’re not stopping there. We’re constantly improving the resolution of our data, particularly in popular adventure destinations.
Map Features
We’ve integrated important features like peaks, passes and national parks as well as other outdoor reference data such as tracks, footpaths, valleys and rivers to make orientation and planning as easy as possible.
Terrain Tools for Every Situation
In the past, when you wanted to accurately find the angle of a slope or the detailed elevation of a particular route you would need to turn to a topographic map.
We have a deep respect for the incredible art of cartography. But there are two main limitations.
- 1. Ease of Translation — Modern topographic maps are very accurate but understanding the landscape from an abstraction is hard. With a lot of practice it’s possible to become very familiar with them but for most people who only use them from time to time, it’s hard to translate all the abstracted information to truly build a mental picture of the area.
- Static and without context — A topographic map is static and designed as a single representation to try and best answer any number of potential applications. It’s correct at the time of publication, but can become outdated with time. It’s also not usually activity specific and lacks any real-time context.
FATMAP allows you to see the world as it is in real life and to understand a place in detail, like never before. And it’s also a computational map that can adjust instantly to get the answers you need at the touch of a button. Just open the terrain tools menu, choose between; gradient, aspect, altitude, avalanche, flats, and the map transforms to give you the precise information you need.
For example, if you’re planning a ski tour and after reading the avalanche forecast and checking the current conditions, decide that you want to stick to slopes below 30 degrees on north facing aspects, above 2200m. Using the overlays, it’s easy to quickly identify the terrain you’re looking for and avoid taking any unnecessary risk.
Take your maps anywhere
The global map will be available on the web and as a dedicated mobile app (on iOS and Android).
But we often go to the outdoors to escape our connected world. Whether heading deep in to the Rockies, the Bernese Oberland or Antartica, with our new mobile app you’ll be able to download any area in the world directly to your device to use offline.
This means you never have to worry about the quality of your connection, your data being drained or whether your map will even work on the mountain.
Your offline map will always be with you and fully loaded with all the same map content, guidebook and terrain tools as the online version. And even when you’re offline, you’ll still be able to locate yourself on it with complete precision using GPS.
When can I get it?
Right now it’s being tested by our Early Access Community (you can join here) whose continued feedback and support is invaluable (thank you to those who’ve taken part so far).
Next, we’ll be rolling out the global map to the wider FATMAP community. If you don’t have an account click here to text yourself a download link or click here to go to the app store.
And then a few weeks later, we’ll open up public access.
But we’re not stopping there. After we release the map, we’ll be working hard to introduce a lot of the new features you’ve been requesting that’ll make planning and collaborating even easier. Watch this space for more information and release information.
Thanks to all of you for being part of our journey so far. We’re very excited to share the next evolution of FATMAP with you in the coming weeks and hope it will inspire you to get out there and explore somewhere new.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions we’d love to hear from you at hello@fatmap.com.
See you out there,
Adam and Team FATMAP
