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Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

objectiveunclear.com

81–90 of 108 posts

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copy this view really only works when you are following a plane or are at an airport you searched for. If that doesn’t work, ping me. I think the map tiles are a symptom of the overnight success of the app. I might have to find a new map provider if they permanently limited my IP

without an airport near "my current location" is my goto. is there a direct link for this? (otherwise i may hack together some userscript that clicks that button for me...) "my assumption" would have been some x/y/angle/zoom params on the url, maybe even with some of the settings encoded in... (autorotate, render-radius or terrain height would be first to come to mind) my "not getting any tiles" must have been 2 or 3…

I’ll work on adding a ‘near me’ direct link. I totally missed that feature so thanks for mentioning it.

Thanks for also pointing out the direct link to airport bug.

I’m planning on furthering the deep link capabilities so you can save other settings.

The premium that I’m planning will have more robust ability to save settings presets.

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#82

It looks very nice. It's a nifty project. However, as the particular kind of weirdo who has a bookmark to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ on his phone's desktop and checks it multiple times daily, I will point out that this UI doesn't add much that the color-coded plane icons on ADS-Bx don't already do, and it is more difficult to quickly visually glean information from.

Maybe this will be something you look at to review interesting flights, or near misses?

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#83

Private pilot here. This is an awesome proyect. I cant make air spaces work, but if you manage to render them properly with TMA, CTR, AWY and other stuff, this would be incredibly useful for students.

There’s a bug where airspace doesn’t like to load after searching for an airport. I’m working on that.

Try loading airspace on one of the default random airports & let me know if it still doesn’t work for you

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#84

I'm only seeing a circle that is lit up? Am I supposed to see the whole globe or is this a glitch on my system? I'm on a M1 Macbook Pro, Sonoma w/ Chrome.

No glitch. It’s purposefully limited upon initial load. Adjust the search radius to increase your view range

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#85

This website is really cool; I love its clean and clear information display. The expanded panel on the side has a lot of configuration options, but I don't quite understand most of it. I also followed you on Twitter; my name is winterx. Bro, you could try creating a 3D version of the Earth using AI and Three.js. You'll gain 10 times more attention online.

Thanks for the note and follow!

I’ll have to experiment with a full 3-D globe. The only problem I foresee is the lag associated with rendering the thousands of global flights all at once.

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#87
post #71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, I tried something similar 30 years ago working for a military contractor: http://zoom.interoscitor.com/PetersonEnterprises/Consulting/... I was asked to come up with a 3D display of the airspace around an aircraft for the pilot to use and which could replace the 2D displays used then. People were impressed, but decided it was impractical for a variety of reasons. You can't really tell where the aircraft are rel…

You might find interesting how space games have tackled this issue. Most share the same design for a radar display that shows targets around you in all dimensions using vertical lines to offset the markers above or below. Check out a video of Elite Dangerous combat to see it in action. It seems conceptually very similar to what you came up with.

Homeworld (1 and 2) also had a great 3D interface for viewing and controlling ships.

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#89

Neat project. Minor usability note, zooming by pinch on a MacBook trackpad is painfully slow.

Thanks for the note. I hear you on the zoom pain. What would be your preferred means of zooming?

Pinch zoom is the preferred method, it just needs to zoom at a usable (much faster) pace.

I have no idea what input events zooming generates. Perhaps an option in the URL could be used to turn on a log of input events that people can copy/paste and submit back to you, so you can get a sense of what events are coming from various devices and input methods without having to find devices to try them all yourself.

Plenty of map sites have spent years broken on Macs, not handling smooth pinch-zoom or Magic Mouse smooth scroll wheel events. A slight 3mm movement of a finger going from fully zoomed in street view to fully zoomed out planet view. I'm assuming every micro-movement event is treated as a Windows scroll wheel event where you expect to move a decent chunk on each event.

However you're treating zoom inputs, you've got the opposite effect. A full zoom motion barely does anything.

Re: Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

#90
Very nice. My only feedback is that on a 2017 iMac (Radeon Pro 580), while rotating around, there is a brief hiccup every 1 second. Probably transferring data to the GPU periodically, but something is blocking rendering. Reproducible on Safari and Firefox.

Not reproducible on Windows Edge or Firefox, on a RX 5700, where it's consistently smooth.

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