Deck.gl: Large-Scale WebGL-Powered Data Visualization | Hacker News Reader

Deck.gl: Large-Scale WebGL-Powered Data Visualization

uber.github.io

107 pointspouwerkerk27 comments

I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I see more WebGL visualizations from Uber. I had interviewed there maybe a year ago for the visualizations team, but didn't get an offer because I "had too much WebGL experience and not enough d3 experience." I think this is now the second or third webgl based library since released by Uber.

About a year ago would have been around the time Twitter's head of visualization joined Uber to become Uber's head of visualization. The team has grown massively since he joined. You should probably apply again.

I know...I coauthored a book on WebGL with them...

You may have applied before the WebGL frameworks team was set up.

I get 14 fps on their top example. New macbook pro. And this is supposed to be ready?

Their shader is doing software 64 bit float emulation, including trignometric functions.

That city graphic is really precise.

(edit: it looks like the 64 bit math is used only for the map projection part of the shader... so it's not quite as ridiculous as it might seem, my haswell system is limited by CPU, not by vertex shader performance)

What should I google to find out more on this topic? Why do they need double precision if they aren't doing computation? Is it actually visible to the human eye?

They are feeding in lat/long coordinates to the shader, and then doing the map projection there. Effectively they want lots of precision, but also the ability to represent coordinates anywhere in the world, in their shader. The alternative is to precompute the projection before putting it into the shader.

Getting around 30fps on a 2015 Macbook Air. Might be due to yours rendering at retina resolution.

I get 20 fps on Safari, 30 fps on Chrome on my Mid-2013 MacBook Air, still running El Capitan.

Just for reference, I'm getting ~10 fps on my Nexus 9 with Chrome.

and its all CPU bound limited by single threaded js. GPU is sleeping <100MHz with barely any usage.

Crashes both IE11 and Chrome 54 for me.

Doesn't crash FF 48, but damn it locks up the system for maybe 20s.

They have a megashader with an entire 64 bit float emulation library, which takes a good while to compile.

Page turned 404. Anybody knew why?

The examples are pretty, but all of them are basically just population density maps[1]. I'm not sure what additional understanding I can take away from the examples.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1138/

> The examples are pretty ... I'm not sure

You got some of it, pretty is part of the point here. You can do nicer looking things with WebGL than with an HTML canvas.

High performance and interactivity is another side of what to look for here. Spend some time rotating and zooming these examples to see the kinds of interactions you don't get in other data visualizations. You can (potentially) visualize a lot more data at interactive rates with a WebGL view than you can with other techniques.

The laying/compositing tech is a third piece of what is interesting here, allowing different data slices to be rendered and included separately. This is useful as it's common to put everything in single WebGL view for ease of implementation initially, but can get complicated and may not scale as well as this layering approach.

The examples are intentionally population density maps. (The NYC example is even titled "Every Person in New York City")

They're examples of the technology, not examples of interesting statistical data.

Opening this site in Safari froze my entire machine. Granted it's a 5 year old Macbook Air but still this should never happen.

Generally it seems to me that whenever something involves WebGL, performance and UX goes out the window.

Sounds like a security bug in Safari and/or OS X, anyone know if Apple offers bounties like Chrome and Mozilla?

Apple started a bounty program at this years WWDC.

Even on a GTX 670 these examples crawl. They seriously need to optimize.

Looks like you need a top-of-the-line gaming rig to run these..

Hardly interesting from a data viz perspective, but I guess good on them for trying to push the tech envelope?

Doesn't work in any browser for me right now and also doesn't appear to be linked from the main Uber github page. Not ready for release?

Examples crashed the WebGL component in Chrome 54...

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