Sources: Natural Earth Data (5.1.1, 2022-05-09), Wikipedia (2024-03-01)

About

Idea

The weight and the travel freedom attached to a passport vary drastically across nationalities. International visa-regulations are very complex and often non-transparent. They reflect the economical and geopolitical situations as well as the relationships of countries.

This project aims to cast some light on these structures. The default Visa-free destinations mode shows a choropleth map, which is shaded based on the number of destination countries/territories an individual of a certain nationality can travel to without a visa or with visa on arrival.

In order to display the visa regulations for a certain nationality, the source country/territory can be intuitively selected by clicking/tapping the map, via the live search field or by choosing it from the country list. In the Visa-free sources mode, you can alternatively explore the number of countries/territories whose nationals can enter a specific country without a visa or with visa on arrival. The GDP and population modes are added for reference. Other modes can be implemented in the future.

For certain passport holders like certain special types of british nationalities it can be more complicated. For this visualization, some simplifications had to be made, ie. only the most common citizenships are used as a data reference.

About the creator

I'm Markus Lerner, an interaction designer and software developer. I develop interactive online tools and data visualizations as well as interactive installations for museums, trade fairs and companies.

If you buy me a coffee, you help me pay for the server costs, keep Travelscope ad-free and enable me to publish more open source software on my GitHub page.

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Source Code

The source code of this project is available on GitHub: https://github.com/markuslerner/travelscope

When I started coding in 2014, I used jQuery and jquery-UI for all the interactions and UI updates. Nowadays I would rather use a libray like React for that.

News

16 July 2018
Disputed areas from Natural Earth Data are now integrated to highlight unresolved conflicts.

29 August 2016
Upon many requests, I decided to publish the source code if this project on GitHub: https://github.com/markuslerner/travelscope

5 April 2016
Travelscope just got selected as an Official Honoree at The 20th Annual Webby Awards in the Web: NetArt category.

5 Oct 2015
Canvas mode for browsers that don't support WebGL is now supported.

4 Oct 2015
The flat map now uses the Robinson projection, which is more appropriate for choropleth maps. Thanks to Zorko Sostaric for the suggestion.

5 May 2015
Travelscope is now featured at Chrome Experiments.

12 March 2015
Lauch of the first version of Travelscope.

Design & technology

This single page web application features a responsive design which works across browsers, platforms and screen sizes. Since WebGL is now supported by iOS, it performs well on recent iOS devices running iOS 8+. Recent Android versions are also supported.

One of the main goals was to be able to render the map in real-time, so that live transformations (spherical to flat) are possible. To achieve this, the powerful Three.js library and its WebGLRenderer are used for display of the map. To keep the map reponsive and save computing power, the map is created as one large BufferGeometry object. The map data are sourced from Natural Earth Data, including the disputed areas maps, then converted to Geo JSON format and simplified to reduce it's complexity. Simplification using MapShaper seems to break the latest map version 5.1.1 – the current data are thus not simplified. It is loaded with D3.js and then transformed to be used in Three.js.

Data sources

Map, GDP and population data: Natural Earth Data

Visa requirements: Wikipedia

Credits

Powered by: Three.js, D3.js, d3.js hooked up to three.js, D3 world map in Three.js (Franz Torghele), Bootstrap, jQuery, tween.js, Google Webfonts (Open Sans), Immybox, Tipsy

Concept, design & coding: Markus Lerner

Feedback:

Many thanks to Krittika and Vinay for their valuable feedback and motivation.


Disclaimer

This website is a non-profit experimental visualization of visa regulation data pulled from Wikipedia in regular intervals and matched to the countries via the sovereignty of the respective country.

The data for territories, disputed areas, partially recognized countries and restricted zones cannot be imported from Wikipedia, because the data for those is not entered in a consistent form for all countries yet. For that reason, the number of visa-free destinations might differ from other indexes.

It is also possible that there are glitches in the way the data are read from Wikipedia besides the fact that the information on Wikipedia might not have been correct at the time of the last update.

Please do refer to the information on the specific countryʼs embassy or consulate website to get the most up-to-date information pertaining to your travel. I do not take any responsibility for the accuracy of the data displayed on this website.

The map uses the cultural vector data and disputed area maps from Natural Earth and their country assignment of the map shapes. Travelscope adopts the same Disputed boundaries policy from Natural Earth: »Natural Earth draws boundaries of sovereign states according to de facto (“in fact”) status rather than de jure (“by law”). We show who actually controls the situation on the ground because it turns out laws vary country to country, and countries are only loosely bound by international law in their dealings with each other. While our de facto policy does not please everyone, it is rigorous and self consistent.«

If you have any feedback or suggestions Iʼd love to hear from you:


Imprint/Privacy policy

For data privacy information please refer to the Imprint

Loading world map and visa data