Wednesday, March 26th, 2014 at 6:31 am by ba3 — Category: Demo

One of the big benefits of BA3′s Altus Mapping Engine is its ability to easily handle thousands, even millions of markers on a map while maintaining a smooth, fluid user experience. This video shows one quick example of those capabilities:

This particular example is showing on-device marker clustering. In this scenario, you give the mapping engine a large set of geographic markers. In addition you assign each marker a ‘weight’ which signifies it’s importance (if you are putting markers on cities, you might use population for the weight; if marking towers you might use tower height; if marking airports, you might use number of gates or runway length). Then you tell the mapping engine to organize them in such a way that they don’t overlap. As the user navigates, Altus displays as many markers as is practical given the zoom level and the amount of screen real estate available. It uses the weight to determine which markers will be visible or hidden to avoid crowding.

This approach allows you to have literally millions of markers on a map. For large-scale marker sets (i.e. over 10,000 markers or so), we recommend that you pre-generate the clustered map using MEtool - it will eliminate the time necessary to add the markers to the map one by one in your code.

This video was recorded on a Nexus 5.