Spatially Adjusted

Tag: mapbox

  • Unreal and Unity are the new Browsers

    Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together. Honestly , no reason. This is big news honestly. HERE, where I work, is teaming up with Unity to bring the Unity SDK and the HERE SDK to automotive applications. I talk about how we used Mapbox Unity SDK at Cityzenith (though I have no clue if they still are). Google and Esri have them too. In fact both Unreal and Unity marketplaces are littered with data sources you can plug in.

    HERE Maps with Unity

    This is getting at the core of what these two platforms could be. Back in the day we had two browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Inside each we had many choices of mapping platforms to use. From Google and Bing to Mapquest and Esri. In the end that competition to make the best API/SDK for a mapping environment drove a ton of innovation. What Google Maps looks like and does in 2021 vs 2005 is amazing.

    This brings up the key as to what I see happening here. We’ll see the mapping companies (or companies that have mapping APIs) deliver key updates to these SDK (which today are pretty limited in scope) because they have to stay relevant. Not that web mapping is going away at any point, but true 3D world and true Digital Twins require power that browsers cannot provide even in 2021. So this rush to become the Google Maps of 3D engines is real and will be fun to watch.

    Interesting in that Google is an also-ran in the 3D engine space, so there is so much opportunity for the players who have invested and continue to invest in these markets without Google throwing unlimited R&D dollars against it. Of course it only takes on press release to change all that so don’t bet against Google.

  • Shadow Analysis Using Mapbox, Unity and OpenStreetMap

    We’ve been pushing along with our latest release of Smart World Professional, and we’ve got some elegant tools coming online that will showcase why we went the route we did.  One of the biggest requests from the AEC industry is Shadow/Solar analysis.  There are tons of tools that do this, but they can be expensive, hard to use and even hard to get data for.  That’s why I really like the Mapbox Unity SDK and its 3D buildings.

    You can, of course, load your own buildings into Smart World Professional but this is a great way to see how your projects will impact the surrounding city out of the box with our tools.  The Unity SDK really shines with this kind of work.

  • Mapbox’s Map Madness

    So this time of year nothing says March more than March Madness (well maybe Easter when Easter is in March).  Lots of companies play off the theme, and it appears Mapbox is jumping on that sports bandwagon themselves with Map Madness.

    I’ve clicked the play button myself, and I’m waiting for the start.  I have no idea what the challenge will be, but I’m up for any of the prizes.  The Mapbox team is full of brilliant people so I can only assume the challenges will be more than just guess where a satellite photo was taken.

    Side note, my Sun Devils somehow made the tourney.  Forks up!

  • Thoughts on Cesium.js

    If you’ve ever seen Cityzenith before, you would know that the basic premise is a 3D Google Earth like world in the browser. The way we accomplish this is using a JavaScript library called Cesium. There is much to like about Cesium and if you’ve never checked it out I highly encourage you to do so. Not only is Cesium we’ll supported/developed, it has a great community around it and lots of great documentation. Cityzenith had been on Cesium for years and you’ll see our screenshots on the Cesium webpages as a use case. When our customers first see Cesium running in the browser they’re all very excited and impressed with how well it works, how good it looks, and we’ve built a business around it. But in August we decided to go another direction and move to Unity3D. I’ll write more about that move later but this is a post on what worked for us with Cesium, where we had problems and what you can expect if you use it. If people ask me about a 3D solution in the browser, I can still equivocally say that I would recommend Cesium.

    Why did Cityzenith choose Cesium?

    The choice of Cesium predates me, so I was not involved with the decision. That said those who made the decision have explained why they went that way. Cesium was probably not the original choice but at the time in 2014/2015 it was the best solution of a “game engine” for our product. We did look at other engines such as Unreal but the 64-bit support and the ease of use in the browser, Cesium won out. In implementing Cesium what were we able to do?

    1. We were able to implement a cross platform 3D world in a browser. That’s not an insignificant accomplishment. Our Cesium team really did an amazing job of making Smart World feel like a regular desktop application even if it was in a browser. No extensions to load, Java or Flash to configure. In a modern browser it basically just worked (more on this though later).
    2. While normally a pain in the rear, the fast updates and quick support for new features on the Cesium project gave us access to new features regularly. We were able to continually update our support for better graphics, performance and features almost by just loading up a new version of Cesium. Of course, in reality it is not that easy but the feature improvements were regular and powerful.
    3. JavaScript is an accessible language. Yes, it has its problems but finding people to code in JavaScript is not difficult. Plus it made it easy to combine other JS libraries we needed into the application.
    4. Open source is very liberating on many levels. Not having to fight a licensing battle and focus on the product is a nice change from other development libraries and SDKs. Also having direct access to the developers. If you don’t follow Patrick Cozzi yet you should. Amazing work and they listen to feedback.
    5. glTF support is second to none. I’ll be talking about glTF soon as well and why we absolutely love it.

    OK, so what didn’t work with Cesium? Why leave it?

    There are really only two reasons we have left. Most of everything else we get with Unity we would either have with Cesium very soon or it’s being implemented today. But the two reasons have been killer for Smart World. I don’t think everyone runs into the same problem we have with their apps so this is more of a specific issue with what we are doing rather than a problem with Cesium.

    1. Cross browser support. Remember when I said that we had cross platform support? Well that really only works if you use Google Chrome. Other browser support is poor at best. Microsoft Edge? Yea not going to happen. Being an enterprise app, we don’t always have the latest and greatest browsers that our customers can use. It’s not an IE8 problem but Edge and Firefox support really killed it for us. It got so bad that we had to put up a modal dialog box that basically said you couldn’t use Smart World without Google Chrome. That’s just unacceptable to us and while we tried to work on solving this the reality of support in other browsers was not coming quick enough and I’m not sure it was a problem that Cityzenith could have solved throwing money at the problem.
    2. Performance in the browser. Chrome is many things and one of them is that it is a memory hog. Loading up cities in Chrome really would put a strain on our user’s computers. The browser is great for simpler 3D mapping but streaming gigabytes of data into a browser really tasked computers. We worked on a ton of LOD workarounds but the compromises to make the application work on a typical enterprise desktop or laptop really left a bad taste in our mouths.

    Roadmap for Cityzenith

    We want to provide the best 3D analytical tools and we’ll continue to do so. Combined with AWS Lambda and AWS IoT services, we’re making a huge leap in how people perform spatial analysis. Not only are we working on our own planning tools such as rooftop solar analysis, LEED-ND analysis and traffic analysis, we’re integrating Rhino Grasshopper plugin support, so anyone can use their existing workflows. As I said above, we’re moving our 3D engine to Unity. In fact we’ll be having a closed beta very soon for our customers to try it out. One of the biggest reasons we went with Unity was Mapbox’s Unity SDK. We are already a big user of Mapbox and thus moving to the SDK made a ton of sense. I’ll go more into this in another article.

  • Hangouts with James Fee:: I’m on a Boat

    If you missed todays Hangout with Mapbox, you can watch it anytime on YouTube. Thanks to Eric Gundersen, Tom MacWright and Lyzi Diamond for joining me.

  • Upcoming Hangouts with James Fee – I am on a Boat

    Hangouts with James Fee starts back up with the crew from Mapbox. Eric Gundersen, Tom MacWright and Lyzi Diamond join me to talk about vector tiles, cartography, APIs, satellite images, aircraft carriers and much more. We go live at 2pm PDT this Thursday (May 26th) on Google Hangouts.

  • CartoDB is the Next Spatial Startup to Get Funding

    Back in June, Mapbox received their Series B round of $52.55M.  With that, Mapbox has turned up their development on just about everything and had a grand old-time at the Esri UC buying just about every advertising space outside the San Diego Convention Center.  At the time Eric said:

    We’re creating the building blocks for a complete mapping stack. This extends way beyond a map.

    Today CartoDB has announced their Series B:

    We are excited to announce the close of $23 million in Series B financing to expand CartoDB’s mission, enabling anyone to map their world’s data and leverage the power of location.

    This moment is truly important because it sends a strong message about the location intelligence revolution as renowned investors validate our position and direction in this growing market. I would like to acknowledge the hard work done by many people in the company in the process — you guys rock!

    Spatial IT is hot stuff right now.  That’s about $75M in Series B funding in little over 2 months.  Bubble?  Probably not as you can’t really say either company hasn’t developed a business and has important clients.  5 years ago there were much more spatial startups running around trying to get money, from GeoIQ and SimpleGeo to WeoGeo1 and Geoloqi all received some funding but ended up being acquired mostly for staff or client lists.  CartoDB and Mapbox are of a different beast and their sustainability has been rewarded by large investments.

    So what’s going on with CartoDB now?  It appears they’re going to continue investing in the core product and make it bigger and easier to work with.  I’m excited for them, the elephant is going for a ride!

    1. Good times ↩

  • Rendering Spatial Data Without Having to Generalize Beforehand

    Yesterday I posted about Chris Hogan’s walk-through of generalizing data in PostGIS to make it usable in a web app.  Basically he went through the process of finding out what is the sweet spot of quality vs speed.  But there are other ways to accomplish this.  Mapbox happened to post about a new library called geojson-vt.

    Let’s see if Mapbox GL JS can handle loading a 106 MB GeoJSON dataset of US ZIP code areas with 33,000+ features shaped by 5.4+ million points directly in the browser (without server support):

    [vimeo 137819760 w=500 h=306]

    Mapbox GL JS and GeoJSON-VT from Mapbox on Vimeo.

    Wait, what?! A few seconds loading the data, and you can browse the whole data set smoothly and seamlessly. But how exactly does that work? Let’s find out

    So that’s actually pretty amazing.  We all know what GeoJSON does in the browser and how it impacts the speed of maps drawing.  100 MB+ data rendering so quickly?  Impressive.  Read the whole post to see how they do it and the details on how to start using it.  The only limitation is that it requires mapbox-gl-js or
    Mapbox Mobile[footnote]which is actually a big limitation if you think about it[/footnote].     UPDATE: Per Tom MacWright:

    Mapbox-Graphic

    Still this comes down to using tools that make your mapping products better.  Maybe Mapbox does that cheaper and quicker than you could on your own.  This kind of on-the-fly simplification is what we’ve all been asking for and Mapbox is really pushing the envelope.  This could be what gets people to start using their platform.

  • ArcGIS Server Revisited

    Legacy GIS System

    We were talking this weekend about how much serving up GIS data has changed in the past 3 years.  GIS Server used to be so important to many of my friends companies to the point they spent tens of thousands of dollars on it a year.  But no longer, each one said that they stopped paying for server because they all use other options.  Now before I go on, I want to say this isn’t about sales data of Esri products.  It’s more about changes in how people are sharing spatial data.  Feel free to replace ArcGIS Server with your favorite GIS server package (Title is a bit of SEO, right?  Heck I’m not even talking about ArcGIS Server in this post).

    I gave a talk years ago about something we did at the GNOCDC mapping recovery from Hurricane Katrina.  You can see the slide deck here and watch the video here.  Basically it was the seeds of what we are going through right now.  It wasn’t that what we were doing back there was very unique, it was just a realization that GIS can’t be hosting “enterprise” data in a “workgroup” environment.  Just like Katrina basically broke the GNOCDC GIS servers, it has become clear that there is almost no way for an organization to use classic GIS servers without putting a lot of load balancing and networking decisions in front of them.

    For most companies this is just way too much infrastructure and licensing costs.  We’ve seen the rise of CartoDB, Mapbox and ArcGIS Online (or whatever it is called these days).  Each has pluses and minuses and while there is overlap, they all do things unique to themselves.  But what the big attraction for each is that you don’t have to manage the constellation yourself.

    The biggest drawback each said was the unknown in licensing.  Most hosted GIS plans are costed in ways that GIS people aren’t familiar with.  Mapviews?  Nobody has analytics on that until you put it in these services.  100,000 map views sounds huge doesn’t it?  But how do you really know?  Service credits?  We’ve wondered what that even means for years.  But I’d wager beers that even with the unknown, you’ll still save money over your ArcGIS Server license or other maintenance you pay for hosting your own GIS server.

    We’re at a crossroads here.  People have begun to start realizing standing up ArcGIS Server, Geoserver or other map servers makes little to no sense in the new marketplace.  Paying for hosting maps is cheaper in the long run, has more availability and is easier to use that classic self hosted mapping solutions.  ArcGIS Online for all it’s confusion is beginning to be leveraged by users and everyone I knew at the Esri UC knows what CartoDB and Mapbox do.  Back in the old days of WeoGeo, we had to prove what we know now every day.  The cost of “doing it yourself” is magnitudes higher than paying for hosting.

    Tide is changing…

  • DigitalGlobe has a Maps API and brought along Mapbox

    So DigitalGlobe has an API in beta.  Funny thing is when I first went to the page I saw this popup for the “first 100 customers”:

    Get DigitalGlobe Maps API now for the introductory price of $1 per 1,000 views

    I guess they don’t have 100 customers yet.  But let’s get beyond the question if it’s even relevant that DG has an API and look at their offering:

    They’ve got two versions of their imagery API.  One that is global and has high frequency updates and one that is color balanced but only regional (and probably not updated often).  But what we really want to see is the API, right?  Well look at the splash page:

    This is why we created a mapping API just for you: easily access our compelling high-resolution imagery of the earth along with fantastic stylized basemap content from Mapbox. We want you to use our imagery in your apps, no matter if you’re an industry giant or a promising startup. We believe our imagery is the standard upon which all others are measured, and we want you to benefit from our expertise.

    Remember this partnership from 3 years ago?  Don’t be so surprised to see Mapbox there.  The plans have been put into motion to see Mapbox integrated with many other vendors but here we have DigitalGlobe’s API built on top of Mapbox.  I’m not sure if DG’s API will be popular but at least we know it’s a robust, easy to use and powerful API.

    What’s the most interesting part of all this is Esri is not to be found.  DG and Esri have had a long time relationship but I think DG has realized that deals with Esri only benefit Esri.  Best of luck to DG and Mapbox!