Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Live Tracking the Tour de France in 3d


Applied Works has used WebGL to create 3d maps of the climbing stages in the Tour de France. Tour de France - Mapping the Climbs currently has two maps which you can view. One is a demo map of stage 7 of the 2012 Tour de France. The other one is a map of stage 10 in this year's race.

Both maps include an elevation chart beneath the map, You can mouse-over the elevation chart to see the location of key events during the stage on the map. The maps themselves include contour lines and zoom controls. Panning the map takes a little getting used to as it differs from the normal panning navigation of interactive maps.

If you click and drag the map, rather than panning, the map rotates around the marked location. This allows you to explore the 3d features of the map. If you wish to move to a new location then you have to mouse-over the elevation chart beneath the map. This centralizes the map on a new location and the new location then becomes the central point which you can rotate the map view around.

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