3D mapping is now live


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By TallPaul on 31/12/17 at 1:58pm

For supporters who are logged in you should now be able to view any route or track in 3D either on our WayMaps tiles or aerial photography, depending on which you are currently viewing in the GPS mapping application. Once you're in it you can switch between WayMaps and aerial.

See our blog post today for a video walk through of viewing one of our walks which should will show you what it's capable of and give you some hints as to how to use the navigation.

Anyway Happy New Year to all of you and thank you all for your generous support which has helped fund this development.


By SheepFarmer on 31/12/17 at 5:11pm

I think the thanks are due to you Paul for all the technical work on this site & Beth for doing the walks, plus the other people behind The Hug.

Both the aerial & way maps generally work in 3d for me but it can take 30 secs for the page & image on it to fully load, but I'm hoping this is down to my slow, slightly below 6Mbps BB speed - currently waiting for Openreach to finish the FTTP in my village. Other times and it seems to be with my big recorded walks, the page loads with the green mass then the map slowly fills and just at the last moment, when is it loading the gpx file as well? the page crashes with a "not enough memory to open this page" at the same time it crashes the original map page.

When using chrome & looking at system usage there seems to be a peak at this time with the 3D tab using up to about 1.4 GB of memory at times and with other bits & bobs using more, standard memory usage can then be over 50% and at the same time the GPU usage is surging to over 40%. So I would guess that it is down to my desktop system running short of RAM. Using Win 10 OS on SSD, 8 GB ram, H170 board but using the Intel HD 530 integrated graphics - so I can see that although my system is only about 16 months old it's time to research the more memory vs graphics card thing. I just tried the same walk that crashed in Chrome in Firefox & it loaded, my impression of the figures is that Firefox was using less standard memory but more GPU at 50%.

Another minor fault that sometimes seems to occur is that zooming with mouse wheel stops working but reloading the page brings it back.

For the future I'd initially thought that it would be nice to have the limitless 2D maps in 3D rather than the section but I now realise that it would probably be to much for slow BB & anything other than a mean PC. But any chance of adding google earth imagery ?


By TallPaul on 31/12/17 at 5:53pm

I think the thanks are due to you Paul for all the technical work on this site & Beth for doing the walks

Actually, this particular project was down to Beth. All I've done is provided moral support and hooks into the existing applications.


By beth on 31/12/17 at 8:52pm

I think the thanks are due to you Paul for all the technical work on this site & Beth for doing the walks, plus the other people behind The Hug.

As Paul said, this is all mine. As is rendering our own waymaps.

Both the aerial & way maps generally work in 3d for me but it can take 30 secs for the page & image on it to fully load, but I'm hoping this is down to my slow, slightly below 6Mbps BB speed - currently waiting for Openreach to finish the FTTP in my village. ... big recorded walks,..crash

Unfortunately it's the nature of the beast. There's a lot of data to be downloaded, and some of it has to be generated on the fly. GPX files which cover a large area take longer. They're loaded first as it's used to work out the bounding box required given the tile server constraints. It just gets drawn over the map after everything is ready.

Can you send us one of your large GPX's so we can poke at it ourselves?

It might help me reduce memory requirements - we've had problems in the past with the 2d mapping app handling routes with lots of waypoints.

of RAM. Using Win 10 OS on SSD, 8 GB ram, H170 board but using the Intel HD 530 integrated graphics - so I can see that although my system is only about 16 months old it's time to research the more memory vs graphics card thing. I just tried the same walk that crashed in Chrome in Firefox & it loaded, my impression of the figures is that Firefox was using less standard memory but more GPU at 50%.

That's not a lot of memory these days especially running Windows 10. This Linux box has 48gb and the browser I'm running with the 3d app has grabbed 5gb real memory with 14gb of virtual. GPU usage hits 70% as it's quite an old NVIDIA card.

Another minor fault that sometimes seems to occur is that zooming with mouse wheel stops working but reloading the page brings it back.

I'd take a guess and suggest the OS is swapping stuff in and out of real memory, along with the browser doing it's own memory handling stuff. This largely comes down to more memory needed.

That said, our Android phones and the tablet do well with only 2gb max. Go figure, as some people say.

For the future I'd initially thought that it would be nice to have the limitless 2D maps in 3D rather than the section but I now realise that it would probably be to much for slow BB & anything other than a mean PC. But any chance of adding google earth imagery ?

Unlimited browsing in 3d: I do have that in the back of my mind as something to investigate, but probably later rather than soon. Google imagery: technically possible, but probably not. Google are quite tetchy at who accesses their tile servers. And they do check up as friends using their tiles have been asked for money. If we can find any other public aerial photography tile servers we'll add them in - they're all the same projection/etc as google so it's fairly easy.

Beth


By SheepFarmer on 01/01/18 at 5:04pm

OK, the thanks then go to you both for all the parts you've done.

I have been having a fiddle with things and the result are confusing for me but i think it's to do with specific tracks & perhaps the way different browsers handle them when rendering in 3D

This track - download/file.php?id=1154 that crashes in Chrome works in Firefox & Edge.

The same track filtered down to 500 points works in all (available here https://drive.google.com/open?id=1S-KuM ... CDn3fdAlsz)

This one - download/file.php?id=1105 didn't work in chrome, nealy worked in Edge last tile didn't load but mouse navigation worked. OK in Firefox

This One - download/file.php?id=974 worked in all 3.

I opened a host of apps then opened the last above and with memory & GPU both hitting 80% it still worked. Whereas the 1st track crashed at much lower figures with chromes out of memory message.

The farm has access through the goverment gateway to Bluesky & Getmapping in conjunction with the OS to some maps & imagery that is very good but looking on their websites very expensive.


By Lancashire Lad on 01/01/18 at 11:59pm

I've just had a quick play with 3D mapping using one of my own uploaded GPX tracks (Scafell Pike from Langdale).

I chose that particular walk on the premise that it is one of the longer ones that I've uploaded - so if that one works ok then I'd be fairly confident that uploads for shorter walks should work properly too.

I count myself fortunate that with my computer, WalkLakes 3D mapping seems to be working just fine. The actual uploading screen took about 30 seconds or so, (in both Waymaps and Aerial View modes), to render the 3D map and show my GPX track, but once the screen had fully loaded, I was able to move the map around at will. I've attached a couple of screenshots of that track below.

I can see this coming in very handy indeed! My thanks to Beth and TallPaul for yet another great addition to the WalkLakes website.

Regards, Mike.



By SheepFarmer on 02/01/18 at 1:04pm

Having done some googling around my problem & those with webGL I found a solution that worked in Chrome and that was to disable hardware acceleration. Which has removed the GPU processing & a chunk of RAM & switched processing to the CPU. I don't normally use Edge so I'm not bothered about it working fully in it.

But I notice that there is a wait time from clicking on the view in 3D whilst the page is loading but my PC is not downloading anything great or processing.

Perhaps the next step is to get both a route & track from a single map into 3D together.

Thank You again for all the work you're putting in and we look forwards to future developments.


By beth on 02/01/18 at 6:22pm

Sheepfarmer: Thanks for those big tracks. They both made my machine busy enough for Firefox/Waterfox to complain. Which gave me a handy test case. A quick and dirty hack has fixed it for me, which is now live. If you can try those tracks again and report back I'd be grateful. Ta.

Beth


By beth on 02/01/18 at 6:27pm

Lancashire Lad: thanks for the feedback.


By SheepFarmer on 03/01/18 at 12:48pm

Beth,

I was fiddling more yesterday and enabled an experimental chrome flag relating to webGL & re-enabled hardware acceleration and all four of the tracks I'd been having trouble with (my 2017 lakes walks) worked but due to a warning on the flags page about security I disabled it, but left the hardware acceleration on and found that the tracks still worked, but this is probably because of your work and to test things more I joined 2 walks together to give 11k points & that still worked.

However I just tried my Catstye cam walk in Edge again but its still getting stuck on the loading as before, from my point of view it doesn't matter but it may for others.

Whilst we're chatting so to speak, can I ask if my question about Multi/Batch Uploads was taken note of, although I realise it's down to the board software.


By beth on 03/01/18 at 1:21pm

Not sure I'm understanding what you mean by multi/batch uploads. Is this track and a route in one file?

As for the big tracks, good that your computer survived the 11k points but shame about the Catstycam. I'll have another look and see if there's anything else I can do.


By TallPaul on 03/01/18 at 1:49pm

Not sure I'm understanding what you mean by multi/batch uploads. Is this track and a route in one file?

I think he's referring to this post to which I'm embarrassed to admit that I never replied. I shall do so there now.


By mloclam43 on 18/09/18 at 5:17pm

HI paul, How do I manipulate the maps with my routes uploaded onto them, to see them in 3D? malcolm


By TallPaul on 18/09/18 at 5:24pm

How do I manipulate the maps with my routes uploaded onto them, to see them in 3D?

You should be seeing a "View in 3D" link bottom right in the route summary box. Just click on that...



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