Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL • Hacker News Board

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#41

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

nvk wrote: post #10

This is beautiful, It's amazing to see how humanity goes over every part of the planet. Which flights are those few going over the north pole?? [~30fps/OSX-Chrome]

I may have misused the term geographically - it's just the shortest, great circle route between 2 airports in the data. As the informed comments say though, there are flights that go over the poles - I think the longest commercial flight for a while was a Singapore Airlines NYC to SIN over the pole.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#42

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:29 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #16

OT but what's up with all the double exclamation marks in the code? https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/b...

Thanks for explanations. Also worth pointing out that that code is part of Three.js - an amazing library that makes it very straightforward to do things like this.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#43

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

adaml_623 wrote: post #20

Gorgeous but those planes are flying in space thousands of kilometers above the surface :-) A clock and animating sunlight/rotation of the earth would be fantastic.

Thanks. Just before I pushed it out to my site, I worked out the real values based on commercial flights and was horrified by how far out the altitudes were. I tried it with correct values and it just didn't look as good so I'll put it down to creative license :)

Great idea for a clock and sunlight map - I'll add those to the list for v2.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#44

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

JohnDoe365 wrote: post #22

Where is the data coming from? API? If not, in what file is it stored on the source code?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/callumprentice/callumprent...

It's munged data from the Open Flights web site.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#45

Post by sizzzzlerz » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

An ability to zoom into a smaller region would be nice. Also, hovering the mouse over an airport would pop up a tooltip with the airport's name and/or code. In any case, this is amazing! Oh, and displaying country borders and/or lat/lon lines would be great as well.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#46

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #15

The polar regions seems a bit stretched out. Is the earth in perspective? Making the flight paths accurate!?

Yep, exactly as phreeza pointed out. I've seen ways of fixing it to make it more accurate but as far as I know, the extra effort and time to render isn't worth the cost.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#47

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:41 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #5

Is the world visualization available on GitHub? Is a framework where you could pass arbitrary lat/longs?

There are a bunch of off the shelf solutions like st0p pointed out. Otherwise, all the code is available at my site (http://callum.com) along with a bunch of other globe based samples. Let me know if I can help.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#48

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

abest wrote: post #2

On my end, it runs great in Firefox but runs at 3 fps in Chrome

Thanks for the feedback - I developed it on OS X Chrome and it runs well (60 FPS) there for me. Which version of Chrome? Surprised there is such a difference.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#49

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

nness wrote: post #23

abest wrote: post #2

On my end, it runs great in Firefox but runs at 3 fps in Chrome

Runs 15~ fps (estimation) on Chrome on my Android HTC One M8, which is impressive

Amazing and thanks for letting me know. Its push around a lot of data so I didn't even try to make it work on mobile. Maybe I should take another look.

Re: Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL

#50

Post by callumprentice » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #24

Interesting, on a desktop browser. On mobiles, 100% probability to kill Chrome on Android.

Yeah, it's really targeted at desktop because of the volume of data but I expect I have missed a bunch of optimization tricks. It's simple enough that I should be able to iterate on it.