Show HN: Interactive WebGL visualization of all 47K buildings in Manhattan
tbaldw.in
tbaldw.in
The visualisation itself was cool, if a bit slow in Firefox on my laptop.
Think of it as grabbing a model physically moving it vs. you controlling camera across a 3D scene.
Edit: Or perhaps, you being the city in third person vs. you being the camera in first person.
You need to double click somewhere to recenter.
How are the controls any different than say, the 3D viewer on this website: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/9D6rDxE5U3Z-delorean-dmc-ti... ?
This vis is rendering ~11 million vertices which is quite a bit for any GPU to render. There are some optimizations that could be made — chunking, frustum culling, LOD, depth testing, etc — but probably not trivially. It would change the look & feel of the demo (things "popping" in and out or lack of overlapping buildings, etc) and probably take a significant effort to code.
You can see Taylor's code here, though: https://twitter.com/taylorbaldwin
The app is vertex bound since the geometry has 11 million vertices, which is not trivial for any GPU to render.
Generally my point is: graphics programming isn't always trivial, and it takes time/practice to debug and optimize a WebGL scene with millions of vertices. Comparing this WebGL side project to a full-blown city-scape game engine is apples and oranges.
If you want a random example of a well-optimized demo that uses WebGL for rendering, try the demo at https://www.funkykarts.rocks/demo.html and see how well that performs.
Reminds me of Escape from New York a bit :-)
> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://tbaldwin.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/bin-to-bbl.csv. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing).
Chrome Mobile Version: 65.0.3325.109
Second launch didn't crash but gave the error: webgl hit a snag with the option to reload or ignore.
Reload: always gives the same error.
Ignore: if no "loading" visible then no further response. If "loading" visible then loading bar continues to load until ~95% complete then no futher response.
Locks up for a few seconds, slowly reaches ~75% loading progress, then "Aw, Snap!"
I zoomed in until I was essentially at ground level and looked around. I have to say that to me, it was depressing. I can't imagine living in a place where 90%(?) of the sky is obscured. It's great so many people like living in the city, but I personally could never do it.
(In Europe Co-Op housing AFAIK isn't for the poor, but not that luxurious either)
to the best of my knowledge the NYC cooperatives are corporations where the individual residents own shares, so it's functionally equivalent to a strata title condominium. the main difference being that people cannot just buy a unit in the coop, they need to be approved by a board vote. apparently even celebrities and senior business figures occasionally get turned down for coop memberships in nyc because other members of the board consider them undesirable for some reason. whereas in a fee-simple strata title system any person or corporation with sufficient money can buy a condominium (unless it's an age 55+ building).
Other than that it's nice.