Japanese architect and artist Hajime Narukawa created what has been deemed the most accurate world map and has just won an award for it.
Narukawa, who created the map at Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance in Tokyo, beat out over 1,000 other entries in a variety of categories and earned the Grand Award of Japan at the Good Design Award contest.
His creation is based on the AuthaGraph projection method, which divides the map into 96 different triangles that are then transferred to a tetrahedron and unfolded into a rectangle. What's even more interesting is that the map, now used in Japanese textbooks, can fit into different shapes without actually losing any of its accuracy.
Photograph: AuthaGraph
The Mercator map, the 447-year-old traditional map of the world, has been considered inaccurate for many years, mainly because Antarctica and Greenland appear to be distorted in it. The Japanese artist successfully attempted to solve the problem by creating the origami-like map.
According to the Good Design Awards, "AuthaGraph faithfully represents all oceans [and] continents, including the neglected Antarctica [and provides] an advanced precise perspective of our planet."