Software visualizer built in Processing that renders personal GPS data interactively in 3D space.
* this is archived content ported from an older design with minimal intervention
Sometimes you build projects that have wide appeal, and other times you just scratch an itch for yourself. Elevation was firmly in the latter territory, but to this day I’m still quite fond of what it was.
In 2009 I was recovering from a snowboarding accident, so I decided to take up cycling as a less strenuous activity. Around the same time I was learning the Processing visual language. Completely unrelated, but two things I could bring together with a bit of coding.
After learning up on map projections and how to plot 2D coordinates in 3D space, I was able to create an app that would pull in GPS files from multiple activities and render them together. With some basic controls for manipulating the view realtime in 3D space, Elevation allowed multiple perspectives and visualizations of accumulated route data.