22nd March 2014
This blog post is outdated.
In January Google relaunched The Google Maps Embed API, I haven’t been using Google Maps for over a year nut I needed to try this out. Google says “There are no usage limits for the Maps Embed API.” but that isn’t true, the limit is “2,000,000 requests/day” so please keep reloading this page. You can’t use your own data or maps with the API, so if you would like to show a place on the map you need to add it through Google Maps. Google probably hopes that this will improve their own place/business data. Google got a great tool for creating these maps. Note that you need a API key.
Basic Map:
Basic Map(Satellite):
Place Map:
Search Map(museums near Stockholm):
Directions Map:
That bus line is really weird and does not exist.
20th March 2014
Two days ago Unity announced the new version of their multi-platform game engine Unity 5, it feels like it was just some months ago they announced Unity 4.
Unity 5 got tons of new features but the best(from my perspective) is that the games will run in web browser without the Unity plugin, thanks to WebGL and asm.js. Right now asm.js only works in Firefox but now when both Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 will use it in their engines, will probably Chrome and IE support it too by the end of the year.
In the trailer Unity and Mozilla showoff the popular game Dead trigger.
The full announced from Mozilla/Unity
15th March 2014
All weeks comes to an end, some of them are great weeks the rest is greater weeks. This week has been interesting, I have been working on one of my two major(secret) projects and my head is full of new ideas(as always). Last week I wrote about my unsuccessful Milky Way project, before I created it I did play around a bit with Three.js just to try it out.
Inside Equirectangular Earth is a project built with the thought that a 360 degrees panorama(360x360) image is a equirectangular image just as the most common maps of earth. Showing off the earth is about rendering the equirectangular image on a sphere, showing off a panorama is about rendering th equirectangular image inside it.
So just because I like weird perspectives and needed to test Three.js and some plugins I did render the earth inside a sphere, can watch this for many minutes in a row. Zooming and dragging is supported too.
Site
Source at Github
7th March 2014
Another week and a overkill experiment. So the “huge” space and WebGL related project that I did mention in the last update, was just to huge.
I got the idea some months ago when I was in Gothenburg, I played around whit a program that visualized the known universe as a particle map and allowed you to browse it in 3D with a Xbox control It blew my mind, not because it was cool but because it shouldn’t be hard to do the same thing with WebGL. The same evening I searched for the data needed. I couldn’t find it and dropped the idea.
Until last weekend when I did send email to the NASA asking about the data, I haven’t got a answer yet and I don’t except one. I did start digging into available sources and what people had done before, and I found that some one had already created a particle map over the Milky way(a Chrome experiment) so rendering universe as a particle map was no longer anything to cool. But rendering it by scale in full 3D would still be cool. After some evil data mining I had data about 150 000 stars, location size and type. I did a test, and rendered 10 stars to see if my code worked as excepted(it did after some errors) and both texture and lightning as well. So then I added all data, and to make a long story short can anyone remind me of this projects when we can put supercomputers in every humans hands?