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World Airports Voronoi

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Re: World Airports Voronoi

#51

Post by jacobolus »

golergka wrote: post #6

This runs slower on my computer than MGSV in ultra settings running on 4k resolution.

It’s projecting thousands of sphere geodesics at pixel precision via breaking them into a large number (hundreds of thousands?) of little line segments and evaluating several expensive nonlinear functions at each of those points with considerable Javascript dataflow overhead for each one, not to mention the cost of putting thousands of polygons with dozens or hundreds of points each into SVG.

It would take either a domain expert or someone willing to spend a few months studying the problem to write an optimized version, but then it could probably be made to run a couple orders of magnitude faster by using slightly coarser approximations for various function evaluations (no need for 10^-15 precision for drawing on screen), or by simplifying the problem to require fewer function evaluations overall (e.g. by using Bézier curve segments instead of straight line segments), rewriting the core of the library to be vectorized, and rendering via a raster- rather than DOM-based drawing system. I’m sure a GPU could handle such a problem very effectively, though working with WebGL might be a pain.

Anyway, go for it!

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#52

Post by nnethercote »

Erwin wrote: post #33
ape4 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.hipmunk.com/flights#f=JFK;t=Easter+Island,+Chile...

Hipmunk comes up with this amazing itinerary: New York to Los Angeles, then LA to Sydney (!), then back across to Santiago, spend 22 hours in the airport and finally 6 hours to the final destination. The second LA to Sydney flight takes off September 2nd and lands on September 4th! https://www.hipmunk.com/flights#f=JFK;t=Easter+Island,+Chile... It reminds of play the amazing retro-future 80days game: http://www.inkle…

> The second LA to Sydney flight takes off September 2nd and lands on September 4th!

But when you fly from Sydney to LA you arrive before you left :) All thanks to the international date line.

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#53

Post by y_u_no_rust »

jacobolus wrote: post #51
golergka wrote: post #6

This runs slower on my computer than MGSV in ultra settings running on 4k resolution.

It’s projecting thousands of sphere geodesics at pixel precision via breaking them into a large number (hundreds of thousands?) of little line segments and evaluating several expensive nonlinear functions at each of those points with considerable Javascript dataflow overhead for each one, not to mention the cost of putting thousands of polygons with dozens or hundreds of points each into SVG. It would take either a d…

I agree, It would probably run considerably faster if it were written in Rust.

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#54

Post by VikingCoder »

Kenji wrote: post #8

I thought that a voronoi partition is not possible with only straight lines on a non-euclidean space like that; this leaves me confused.

I believe Voronoi can be applied on high-dimension points, producing polytopes.

So, run Voronoi on 3D points that happen to all be on the sphere... Then intersect the polytopes with a sphere. Tada - great arcs.

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#55

Post by megablast »

jzawodn wrote: post #23

Hm, appears to be missing a lot of smaller airports in the USA. My home airport (E45) in particular. I'm guessing it's only using airports that have commercial air carrier service of some sort.

I think there is about 10,000 airports in the US, so I bet it is missing quite a few.

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#57

Post by tacticus »

trose wrote: post #32

There's definitely a handful of airports in Antarctica. Are they not "official"?

Well they certainly have iata codes and serve larger aircraft than places like albany wa.

Wilkins supports normal commercial aircraft like the a319

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#59

Post by lucaspiller »

minimax wrote: post #45
idlewords wrote: post #31

What a cool project! This is very fun to play with in conjunction with the ETOPS (extended twin-engine operations) settings on the Great Circle Mapper. http://www.gcmap.com Among other things it drives home how remote the waters MH370 disappeared in are.

I recently did ORD-HKG and spent quite a lot of time thinking about ETOPS diversion airports over Siberia (because honestly what else are you gonna do). Now I'm wondering if you can even land a fully laden 777 at any of them. Most of them don't even seem to have wikipedia pages.

A few years ago I flew to the north of Sweden in January and as expected the ground was covered in snow. What surprised me was that the runway wasn't cleared - we actually landed on the snow. This was in a Boeing 737 so not exactly a small aircraft.

Re: World Airports Voronoi

#60

Post by lincolnq »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #39
golergka wrote: post #6

This runs slower on my computer than MGSV in ultra settings running on 4k resolution.

Completely unusable on my iPad Air. Damn. It's amazing how fast computers are. And it's amazing how slow we make them with layers and layers of cruft built atop more layers and layers of cruft.

Hmm, that's not really fair. Programmer time is a major consideration.

We live in a time where a complicated, interesting visualization like this can be built in a day or two, and appear as #3 on hacker news. Less than 10 years ago it probably would have taken 10x the time, maybe more, and your iPad Air didn't exist.

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