The Landprint

Z Corp, a company who partners with my employer, recently launched a new online printing service called Landprint to create 3D maps of user selected regions of planet Earth. The full topography is printed in 3D and colored to match satellite photos.

I love maps, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try this out. The choice of locations was clear–my former home, Ometepe island in Nicaragua.

Landprint of Ometepe island in Nicaragua

Profile view of the Landprint

Here’s my hand for scale. It’s kind of small.

It’s made of a hard sturdy resin. I knew it was going to be small, but I underestimated just how small 4″ was. That’s okay, because the thing is really neat. They make objects slightly larger but they get prohibitively expensive pretty quick. The 4″ model was priced closer to the impulse buy range.