Map apps and kits

Each app takes public data about Toronto and puts it on a 3D map you can move with your thumb. They share two kits: one for the map, one for the glass controls on top of it. Open one on a phone; that is where they are meant to be used.

  1. Soluna

    Plan a photograph around the light. Choose where you will stand and what you want behind the sun or moon, and it finds the minute they line up.

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    The CN Tower in silhouette with the setting sun directly behind its pod, and a gull crossing the skyThe morning sun sitting exactly on the tip of the CN Tower's spire, seen over treesThe CN Tower lit red and white at night with the full moon beside its shaft
    Three photographs I planned with it, and a moonrise in time-lapse.

  2. Pulse

    A week of Toronto Bike Share, playing on a map. Red stations are emptying, green ones are filling.

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    Pulse on a phone: a dark map of Toronto covered in red and green spheres, one for each bike share station

  3. Apartments

    Every rental apartment building in Toronto's registry, in 3D: sized by its number of units, coloured by its city inspection score.

    Try ApartmentsMore
    Apartments on a phone: a 3D map of a Toronto neighbourhood with apartment towers coloured from red to green

  4. Under Toronto

    What is under the streets: every sewer at its measured depth, every watermain by the year it was laid, 26 years of watermain breaks, and the boreholes drilled for the highways.

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    Under Toronto on a phone: downtown from above with glowing lines under the streets, sewers in blue, violet and pink

Map kit

The parts every one of these apps needs: the map, 3D buildings, an app that loads fully before it shows, one small opening move of the camera, and a frame loop that stops drawing when nothing is changing.

It is being pulled out of the three apps now. The test of whether it is finished: a new app built from a dataset's name and a one-page recipe that says which column becomes height, which becomes colour, and where the camera opens. A model can propose the recipe; code checks it before anything is drawn.

Under Toronto is the first app written on the kit's parts.

Glass UI kit

The controls in my apps. The panes are real glass: a shader bends the map behind them the way a lens would, instead of blurring it.

More on the glass