

Nokia Maps 3D (WebGL) - jasondavies
http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/

======
twp
This is a really impressive demo. Most virtual globes (e.g. Google Earth)
separate the terrain, surface image and building data. Normally, these are
sent to the client separately and merged in the graphics card: the surface
image is texture mapped onto the terrain, and then the building data is drawn
separately on top. Special routines are used to draw trees (e.g. billboards).

What Nokia have done here is to merge everything - terrain, surface image,
buildings and trees - into the same model. They're still using the classic
chunked level of detail approach, just with more complex models, which the
graphics card handles with ease.

This requires more work on the server side to prepare the data, but once it is
done it is _really_ fast for the client. The main disadvantage is that the
data ends up being very static - you can't move objects around, for example.

P.S. I'm currently working on open source WebGL globes like OpenWebGlobe
(www.openwebglobe.org) and WebGLEarth (www.webglearth.org). If you're
interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading www.virtualglobebook.com
.

~~~
yogrish
Lot of webGL these days. As you are directly working on this technology, I
would like to know how the future of it is going to be?

~~~
twp
I think the future for WebGL is very bright, especially as it becomes more
widely available on mobile, and a full screen mode with mouse capture gets
added on the desktop (critical for games).

A little more here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3429641>

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nobody_nowhere
The mapping team at Nokia is by far the best software development team in the
organization (maybe with the exception of Trolltech/qt), and it's surviving
the MSFT integration. It's (largely) the legacy of the successful acquisition
of Gate5 in Berlin -- and somehow the team there was able to resist full
assimilation into the Borg. I was talking to a Nokian today who commented that
in Nokia, "Berlin is the new Helsinki".

~~~
Spearchucker
Your friend is right. I freelanced there earlier this year to create a
prototype of Ovi Maps on Windows Phone. I couldn't stay on to see the
production version through (commitments in London), but what they shipped on
the Lumia (Maps and Drive) is awesome.

[Edit] Earlier LAST year, this year's only a few days old ;-)

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micheljansen
Smooth as butter! Too bad there is no way to search or get permalinks to
specific location-view combinations, but hey, it's a demo :)

~~~
jasondavies
I think this is destined to eventually replace their plugin-based version at
<http://maps.nokia.com/> \- at least for WebGL browsers.

~~~
robin_reala
I wonder if MS will ever support WebGL? When they had 95% market share they
could afford to not support new tech safe in the knowledge that the rest of
the industry wouldn’t bother coding to it. Now they’re sub-50% in a lot of
sectors and there are a lot of visually impressive tech demos coming out that
they don’t support.

~~~
emehrkay
They probably won't, which is why in an earlier thread I said that IEN will
always be IE6. My assumption would be that they'd do something along the lines
of webDirectX and we'd have to create a shim to give it a common interface.

~~~
mbostock
Agreed. Given DirectX and Direct3D, MS is unlikely to support a derivative of
OpenGL. That may eventually change if WebGL becomes widely adopted, forcing
their hand, but current lack of support in IE9+ is a major inhibition to
adoption. I doubt they would create a competing standard (such as WebDirectX).

Instead, MS is pushing performance improvements and hardware acceleration for
Canvas and SVG. This is NVIDIA, but to give an example of the possibilities:

<http://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering>

IMO, focusing on these isn't a bad thing, because these 2D technologies are
substantially easier to use (e.g., SVG is declarative and integrates with
CSS). Though, WebGL is obviously more expressive.

We may also see some WebGL-derived technologies make their way back into CSS +
SVG. Similar to SVG filters for CSS:

<http://www.w3.org/Graphics/fx/>

Proposed GLSL shaders for CSS:

<http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css-shaders.html>

~~~
cscheid
(And the irony behind "WebGL is a derivative of OpenGL" is that on Windows (at
least for Chrome and Firefox), WebGL is actually all based on Direct3D, via
ANGLE:

<http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/>)

I would love to see shaders on CSS, but GLSL is such an ugly layer to add on
top of a fairly nice design. Notice how the SVG filters are so much simpler to
specify than the GLSL-on-CSS proposal.

I would much rather that Adobe designed a more restricted, declarative little
language which would easily compile to GLSL, than bolt an almost-turing-
complete C variant on top of CSS which is hard to reason about, hard to
guarantee safety (most of the webgl-crashes-video-drivers issues have still
not been solved, aside from the hamfisted "we will block webgl if we see this
set of drivers" solution), and hard to interoperate.

------
roadnottaken
It looks like only the cities that are labeled have 3D data (buildings etc),
but those that do look phenomenal. Even the trees look pretty good!

~~~
te0006
No, unlisted cities may be partially covered. There is quite an amount of
coverage for Berlin, Germany, for example (far from complete though).

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Zirro
It didn't even increase the speed of my computers fans from lowest point. And
normally, a YouTube-video can be enough to do that. That's impressive.

Nokia scores a point with me here, if they keep delivering things like this I
may even consider buying one of their phones one day.

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adam-a
Includes anaglyph 3d mode too if you put "nw.setRedBlueStereo(true, 10.0,
10.0)" in your js console.

~~~
lostsock
Awesome! Though it seems to work better for my particular anaglyph glasses if
you set the values at ~40

~~~
adam-a
I don't have any glasses to try it with unfortunately, but cool to hear it
works!

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Niten
Can anyone fill us in on how they're collecting such accurate 3D detail for
all these buildings? I mean are they flying airplanes with 360 degree cameras
over the major cities at low altitude, for instance?

~~~
andreadallera
I'd really like to know that too. Also, are they collecting data themselves?
If not, where are they getting it from?

~~~
Spearchucker
It's based on a virtual cityscape, which is painted with images taken much
like StreeView's. The 3D models are built with data from Navteq's Journey View
system, using lidar (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR>). Photos are then
stitched and rendered onto the 3D models.

~~~
megrimlock
Thanks for the details! This technique works surprisingly well. (One of the
artifacts I was able to find is at the base of the Bay Bridge in SF's SOMA --
there's a vertical wall that has the street surface projected up along it
rather than an actual hole underneath the bridge. That does seem like a
challenging case for airborne lidar + stitching.)

Another impressive spot is the top of the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas --
it manages to capture the spike at the top fairly well. It'd be interesting to
know how much hand-editing they did for sites of interest like that, and how
they represent hand-edits in a way that can be re-applied when new lidar
datasets come in.

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unwind
Fantastic. Is there a way to create a link to a given viewpoint
location/direction/zoomlevel? That would make it possible to share views of
the world, always nice.

When zoomed into an area for which there is 3D building coverage, it feels
almost game-like. And I say that from a vantage point of some relevance. :)

~~~
rev087
I wonder how photography will be affected by this sort of technology in the
not so distant future, as the images and point cloud data increase in
definition. For instance, instead of waiting for the perfect weather
conditions for the desired picture, the "photographer" could simply manipulate
lighting and such, then render the scene in high definition.

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smhinsey
Wow, I am impressed with how responsive that is. I'm on an Air and I generally
don't have good experiences with this sort of thing.

~~~
blub
What is the config if I may ask? I'm thinking of getting an Air for dev work
(13" 2011 model).

~~~
smhinsey
No problem. I believe mine is a late 2010 model. It has the 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
with 4 GB of RAM. It's 11'' rather than 13''. Performance is generally
excellent and it's probably the best computer I've ever owned in terms of
outright utility simply because it's approximately the size of a Kindle DX and
I can take it anywhere without a thought. The fact that it's usable and
responsive essentially instantly after opening the lid is also huge.

The only real problem comes with pushing pixels around, as the other reply
mentioned. I can watch QT video fine, but if I go to Vimeo or YouTube, I can't
really get a good playback out of Flash. Generally Flash is bad on this
machine. I'm a long time Mac user so I'm not too unused to this, but it seems
a little worse than on an iMac or something like that.

I think if you use an IDE for dev work you should check it out at an Apple
Store or something to make sure the resolution works for you. That's really
the only thing I'd consider. My 11'' is really just too small to me, having
been spoiled by dual 30''s on my desktop. If you use a text editor or
vim/emacs it'll probably be fine, but IntelliJ or Eclipse or whatever just
have too many windows to manage in the space, in my opinion.

~~~
blub
My choice is between MBP 13" and Air 13", and looking at the online store, Air
actually has the better resolution (~1440x900 vs. ~1280x800). I was surprised
at this, but I have used Xcode on 1440x900 on a 15" MBP and I was ok with it.

Thanks!

------
bluena
Who thinks it's better than Google maps?

~~~
untog
Er, not me. Where's the search box?

Stuff like this does look genuinely awesome, but Google Maps provides a whole
different set of functionality. Searching, routing, etc.

~~~
artursapek
Well, what Nokia has done is better than the way Google has it set up. At
least for advanced machines that can run it. But I'm sure Google will catch up
when it's a reliable standard.

~~~
kalleboo
Google has their own WebGL demo which isn't anything like this
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106658>

~~~
artursapek
I've played with their streetview transition in GL... really nice.

------
Gerdus
very cool. the satellite imagery seems both more detailed and more recent than
Google's.

~~~
MindTwister
Came here to say the same, google maps imagery of my area is about 7-10 years
old.

~~~
Spearchucker
I was convinced the CIA was watching me, because I've been checking Google
Maps for over a year now and the same white van's been parked outside my house
for all that time. I just saw that on Nokia maps it's left. Thank goodness!

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bcowcher
Can anyone tell how old the maps are that they are using? I looked around but
I couldn't find anything.

I tried zooming over my workplace in Darwin, AU and the building we work in
isn't even there.. (its roughly 5years or so old)

I imagine there is probably a mash up of old/new map data in there depending
on the population of a given place..

------
jamesbkel
Wow. Very impressive. I'm in Boston and was able to pull an almost
disturbingly detailed 3d view of my balcony.

~~~
freehunter
First time I saw Google Street View, I was sitting on my balcony with my
laptop. I looked at the Google image for my street, and it was me sitting on
the balcony with my laptop. I had to do a double-take before I realized the
picture was taken a few weeks prior.

------
headShrinker
Amazing how well the software renders thousands of objects. On close
inspection, I find the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the rendering geometry
very appealing. <http://i.imgur.com/dNYer.jpg>

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kordless
Here's the APIs for the older version: <http://api.maps.nokia.com/>. Hopefully
they'll be doing some documentation on using the new WebGL based API!

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rospaya
Nokia (Ovi) Maps was always the best built in GPS solution for smartphones.

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potyl
It's really nice! I hope that Nokia releases this eventually.

~~~
jasondavies
Presumably this is a precursor to replacing their 3D plugin version at
<http://maps.nokia.com/> \- at least for browsers that support WebGL.

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feralchimp
On Safari: This requires latest Chrome or Firefox.

On latest Chrome: There was a WebGL compatibility problem. Please check system
settings.

Yay standards?

~~~
artursapek
16.0.912.63 Chrome on OSX here, works beautifully

~~~
r4vik
chrome detects if your graphics card is on some whitelist of gcards known to
work with webGL. you can override (force on) this in chrome:flags I believe

~~~
artursapek
Woah, what? Why have I not seen chrome:flags before? This is like Christmas

------
acgourley
I've been wanting an API key to nokia's 3D maps for a while. There are a lot
of gaming possibilities there.

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suyash
Isn't the WebGL stuff done by Navteq, that's who the copyright says.

~~~
recoiledsnake
Nokia owns Navteq.

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digitalnalogika
Does anyone else have all text on globe upside-down?

~~~
megablast
Are you in Australia? Just kidding, since I don't have the latest version of
Firefox, despite clicking the check for updates box, I can not check this out.
I even tried downloading chrome but it failed. Naturally google needs
javascript to let me download a file, and even when it was enabled it did not
download.

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bthomas
Is there a writeup anywhere on how this is done?

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nielsbot
downtown Chicago is lots of fun

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tomelders
yeah, that's pretty cool.

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FredBrach
I wonder how do they get the building facade textures/polys... It seems they
have not only vertical satelite shots but also inclined ones.

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FredBrach
Not bug free: <http://fredbrach.posterous.com/pas-de-sujet> This is the limit
between the 3D data and the flat ones.

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cpa
No scale? Not a map.

