Monday, February 23rd, 2015 at 12:37 pm by ba3 — Category: Demo
As more and more clients adopt the BA3 Altus Mapping Engine, one thing we consistently hear is that the Altus Mapping Engine is the best way to display tiles from any source, including Mapbox tiles and WMS tiles. Altus offers a number of advantages over the competition:
- Altus can display your tiles on iOS, Android and Windows 8 on mobile platforms, and both Windows 8 and OSX on the desktop. Your maps and your capabilities look identical on all platforms.
- The performance with Altus is superb. Your users get a rich, fluid user interface experience. Various caching schemes can improve performance even more
- All mapping assets can live on device or can stream in. Altus is happy to use MBTiles files, providing completely disconnected operation in remote areas.
- If you are not interested in raster tiles, consider vector maps for your base maps from sources such as OpenStreetMap, NaturalEarth, Esri or custom vector sources.
- Altus is very comfortable with terrain data as well, with custom color maps, terrain profiling and dynamic terrain alerting (e.g. TAWS).
- Altus automatically reprojects your tiles onto the sphere - things like great circle routing are automatic in Altus
- Altus allows you to overlay your tiles with a wide variety of additional layers including markers, vectors, polygons and raster images (with alpha)
The following image shows how rich and complex the layering can get:
In this image you see 5 simultaneous layers:
- A base map of MabBox tiles
- A vector layer that manages the rubberbandable route
- A marker layer carrying thousands of wind barbs, each marker with its own glyph
- A polygon layer for weather advisories
- A raster cloud layer that overlays everything else - and if you press the play button, it is animated with six frames of cloud activity.
Even with all of that data on-screen, the UI remains fluid and impressive even on the iPad 2. On the desktop, advanced layering with GPU acceleration creates nearly unlimited possibilities.
No other mapping engine can provide this sort of comprehensive layering with high performance on mobile devices today.
Do you have Mapbox tiles or WMS tiles that you need to display for your users? Learn more about the BA3 Mapping Engine today.
If you have questions about Altus products and services, the demonstration code or licensing, please contact us at: [email protected]. Also, any feedback, comments or suggestions that you have are always greatly appreciated.