National parks of New Zealand in 3D | Hacker News Reader

National parks of New Zealand in 3D

felixpalmer.github.io

155 pointspheelicks41 comments

The Department of Conservation (DOC) that look after the National Parks in NZ are brilliant. I drove all over NZ in a campervan about twelve years ago - as many do - literally every second vehicle you see is a campervan - and everything is really well signposted. You pull off the road into a layby, and there will be a wooden sign saying "Waterfall - 30 min walk" and then you follow a well kept path for 30 min and then you find a waterfall. Simple! And there are unstaffed DOC campsites in very beautiful places with very basic facilities (tap, compost loo). You just stay the night and then drop an envolope of cash into a box. And the huts in the middle of nowhere that take days to hike to, somehow they keep them maintained too.

This is exactly the experience I’ve had at American national parks. Signs don’t state the time but distance and the envelope drop off is used extensively. This is coming from someone that did a road trip through all 48 continental states over a 3 month period and we camped all the time and only stayed in hotels/motels once a week.

My pet peeve with NZ is topo maps situation. DOC really needs a free offline map app - that would save lives. Right now there's plenty of apps, some free some paid, most using DOC's maps from their web app. But the quality is variable so you can't trust it. Plus backpackers are not gonna pay $10 for maps.

>> literally every second vehicle you see is a campervan

Sounds like a driving hell. Clarkson would be beside himself.

Its every second vehicle, but most of the time the vehicles are few and far between. NZ is actually a lovely driving experience, around every bend there's another beautiful vista.

Edit: take a look:

https://www.google.com/search?q=driving+around+new+zealand&t...

It's a slight annoyance, but far from hell. As long as it's not someone super old on a very large van then they go maybe 10k's less than speed limit.

Note most people driving in NZ at around speed limit. Going faster feels unsafe. Roads are pretty twisty and mountainous. Driving 2hrs in NZ is not same as 2hrs on highway with cruise control on.

It looks a bit weird for me - https://i.imgur.com/rC3wXOw.png

I take that's not normal, is it?

There is an issue with the elevation shaders on Windows, being tracked here: https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/issues/2

For anyone who is having issues, I made a quick video here: https://twitter.com/pheeelicks/status/1334101837625090050

Fascinating, that’s arguably worse than the lag and the browser chrome turning white while the tab is open for me on Palemoon 28.16 — an independent hard fork of ancient Firefox with the old extension APIs and incompatible with all sorts of modern bloat websites. Eg. the Spotify link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25278187 leads to a blank black page for me, and Imgur recently was showing me blank grey unless I opted out of its beta (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=25025#p19722...) — on GNU/Linux.

same for me on Edge 88.0.705.9

possibly a good idea to highlight there is an issue on windows on the web page, my instant reaction was "whoa, that's horrible, why are people liking this?"

Similar on Egmont too https://i.imgur.com/sGQuU36.jpeg

Firefox 85 on Windows

I'm seeing the same. Firefox 82.0.3 on Win10.

same problem for me (brave V1.17.73) on windows 10

Beautiful. I hiked a few of the mountains in 2014 and miss New Zealand every day. The only thing this site misses is the sheer scale. There’s something about sitting at the base of a mountain and feeling so incredibly small that can’t be replicated virtually.

The journey from the North Island to the South Island is a journey into a different scale of landscape. It feels as if you shrink to 10% of your previous size.

Please could you explain a little how you did this for people not familiar with such things as 3D and maps? What would someone have to do, to create this for another part of the world? What is NASADEM and LINZ?

Gladly:

- Procedural GL (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js) is a JavaScript library for rendering 3D terrains. It is built on top of THREE.js but you don't need to know anything about 3D to use it - a high-level API is provided. The software is open source, but of course you need to supply it with source data, for it to be useful. In particular you need elevation data to give you the shape of the terrain, and aerial imagery to give the color on the terrain.

- NASADEM is an elevation dataset published by NASA and integrated into this library via the https://www.nasadem.xyz/ service. You don't need to understand how this works, all you need is an API key. A free tier is available.

- LINZ is a (incredible and free) basemap provided by the New Zealand government: https://basemaps.linz.govt.nz/. Integrating with Procedural GL was just a matter of configuing the URL for the tiles and adding an API key. Note it is New Zealand only, by default Procedural GL uses www.maptiler.com/ (again a free tier is available)

As for what one would need to do make this for another part of the world:

1) Fork https://github.com/felixpalmer/new-zealand-3d 2) Update the locations of interest in https://github.com/felixpalmer/new-zealand-3d/blob/main/park... 3) Optionally change the imagery datasource (Maptiler, Mapbox etc) [don't forget attribution] 4) Profit

To clarify slightly, LINZ is Land Information New Zealand, a government agency. They provide an enormous amount of map data on NZ under a creative commons license: vector data, address info, aerial photography (including multiple versions over time), satellite data, etc.

Not sure how it's supposed to look like, but in Mozilla it looks like there are staggering levels of change. Looks like it's some sort of cell that is much higher than it should be. https://imgur.com/JmoWTAa

It seems impossible to view the horizon with this viewer, which is kind of frustrating.

Google maps used to have a feature where if you scroll back from street view you would get a 3D rendering before they gave you the 2D satellite view if you scrolled further back.

Not sure why that went away, but it was pretty cool, and I enjoyed exploring a number of places with the feature before it went away.

It's still there. Just tested it with google.com/maps in Chrome 86 on Linux. Steps to reproduce: 1. Enter Street View 2. Scroll out a few clicks

Expected and observed behavior: the viewport switches to 3D-mode, with the view centered on the location and direction being observed in Street View.

Hmm, maybe its my browser, I'm still in Windows 11

Looks cool, but IMO controls aren't that intuitive (at least allow keyboard rotate I think, and mousewheel zoom), and even in 2D view, it still applies depth fog/haze, so if you zoom out a bit, everything just whites out, and you can't really see much...

Really nice. Much more responsive and snappy than I expected on my old phone (Samsung galaxy s8).

Wonderful work. There is a similar project called Terra that someone at Mapbox did, but the raster tiles for that aren't working anymore (prob due to API change) so it's nice to see an alternative -- a whole library no less.

The controls seem a little wonky. Sometimes dragging moves the map around, and other times it swivels it. There's no North arrow. You can't zoom out far enough, and it gets all misty when you try.

Other than that, beautiful.

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding the controls, they are configured to keep the user to a certain area so that why you're seeing the swivel I think. As for the remaining 3 issues, these are all just design choices for this experiment, and can be configured in the library that powers this: https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/

Imagine mountain bike trails overlaid on top of this. Or even a live track.

https://fatmap.com/

https://ayvri.com - I'm a bit biased as I'm the founder.

No bikes on national parks mate

This is amazing. I wish this resource was available when I have been doing hikes in the Austrian mountains. Does anyone know if there's anything similar for Europe?

The Procedural GL (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/) library on which this is built works worldwide. I made this (National Parks) app in an afternoon, and it could easily be modified for any set of locations in the world, just update the https://github.com/felixpalmer/new-zealand-3d/blob/main/park... file

See also Bergwelten.com, for Austria in particular. They have hikes with a 3D view.

Oh wow the 3D map of Bergwelten.com is actually made with your library! So cool!

Google Maps in satellite mode? IMO Google Maps looks better and of course includes way more meta data.

I assume this project is more about showing off the underlying open source project.

Nice! Seems similar to Fatmap.com, I’ve been a user for years.

Impressive graphics. This would go well with webVR

Nothing loads for me. White page on the right.

Where is the height and texture data from?

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