Have you ever wanted to make a small web app to share your favorite places with your friends? For example your favorite photographs attached to a hike, or just a view of your favorite peak, or your favorite places downtown, or a suggested itinerary for friends visiting?

Right now it is difficult to easily incorporate third party map data into your own projects. Creating 3d games or VR experiences with real world maps requires access to proprietary software or closed data ecosystems. To do it from scratch requires pulling data from multiple sources, such as image servers, and elevation servers. It also requires substantial math expertise. As well, often you may want to stylize the rendering to suit your own specific use cases. You may have a tron like video game aesthetic for your project and yet the building geometry you're forced to work with doesn't allow you to change colors. While there are many map providers, such as Apple, Google Maps and suchlike, and there are many viewers - most of these tools are specialized around showing high fidelity maps that are as true to reality as possible. What's missing is a middle ground - where you can take map data and easily put it in your own projects - creating your own mash ups.

We see A-Terrain as a starting point or demo for how the web can be different. With this component you can build whatever 3D experience you want and use real world data.

We’ve arranged for Cesium ion (see http://cesium.com) to make the data set available for free for people to try out. Currently the dataset includes world elevation, satellite images and 3d buildings for San Francisco.

For example here is a stylized view of San Francisco as viewed from ground level on the Embarcadero:

You can try this example yourself in your browser here (use AWSD or arrow keys to move around):

https://anselm.github.io/aterrain/examples/helloworld/tile.html .

This component can also be used as a quick and dirty globe renderer (although if you're really interested in that specific use case then Cesium itself may be more suitable):

I have added some rudimentary navigation controls using hash arguments on the URL. For example here is a piece of Mt Whitney:

https://anselm.github.io/aterrain/examples/place/index.html#lat=36.57850&lon=-118.29226&elev=1000

The real strength of a tool like this is composability — to be able to mix different components together. For example here is A-Terrain and Mozilla Hubs being used for a collaborative hiking trip planning scenario to the Grand Canyon:

Here is the URL for the above. This will take you to a random room ID - share that room ID with your friends to join the same room:







As another example of lightweight composability I place a tiny duck on the earths surface above Oregon. This is just a few lines of scripting:

This example can be visited here:

https://anselm.github.io/aterrain/examples/helloworld/duck.html

To accomplish all this we leverage A-Frame — a browser based framework that lets users build 3d environments easily. The A-Frame philosophy is to take complicated behaviors and wrap them up html tags. If you can write ordinary HTML you can build 3d environments.

A-Frame is part of a Mozilla initiative to foster the open web —to raise the bar on what people can create on the web. Using A-Frame anybody can make 3d, virtual or augmented reality experiences on the web. These experiences can be shared instantly with anybody else in the world — running in the browser, on mobile phones, tablets and high end head mounted displays such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. You don’t need to buy a 3d authoring tool, you don’t need to ask somebody else permission if you can publish your app, you don’t publish your apps through an app store, you don’t need a special viewer to view the experience — it just runs — just like any ordinary web page.

I want to mention just a few of the folks who’ve helped bring this to this point — this includes Lars Bergstrom at Mozilla, Patrick Cozzi at Cesium, Shehzan especially (who was tireless in answering my dumb questions about coordinate re-projections), Blair MacIntyre (who had the initial idea) and Joshua Marinacci (who has been suggesting improvements and acting as a sounding board as well as testing this work).

The source code for this project is here:

https://github.com/anselm/aterrain

We’re all especially interested in seeing what kinds of experiences people build, and what directions this goes in. I'm especially interested in seeing AR use cases that combine this component with Augmented Reality frameworks such as recent Mozilla initiatives here : https://www.roadtovr.com/mozilla-launches-ios-app-experiment-webar/ . Please keep us posted on your work!