Procedural Ltd, the company behind the popular open source 3D mapping library Procedural GL, will join CARTO. The team behind the technology will help take the visualization capabilities of the CARTO platform to the next level.
CARTO has open source as a key part of its DNA, taking a leading role as part of the vis.gl steering committee and as a major source contributor to the headline project, deck.gl. It is the deck.gl library that powers the visualizations in CARTO’s Spatial Analytics platform, delivering a rich set of visualizations from scatterplots to heat-maps that help customers instantly understand the geolocation data in their data warehouses.
3D First Mapping
Procedural GL was conceived as a way of making 3D mapping seamless and accessible on the web, providing a user experience where a 3D map loads as quickly as a static image, rather than being a heavy “application” which burdens the user with a loading spinner while it initializes. Procedural GL achieves this by its unique GPU-first architecture, where computationally intensive operations are handled by algorithms on the graphics card, allowing the CPU to use its resources on rendering the web page. This approach is especially effective on mobile devices, where the CPU is underpowered relative to the GPU.
Most geospatial datasets are flat in nature, consisting only of longitude and latitude. By moving processing to the GPU, Procedural GL makes it possible to enhance such 2D data with an elevation component at practically zero cost. The technology is proven in the field, helping hundreds of thousands of users better understand the world; from orienting themselves in a ski resort to visualizing the surroundings of a hike.
Combined with the experience and talent of CARTO’s Professional Services team, this technology will let our customers quickly, easily and cost-effectively build solutions which were previously unimaginable. Over the next few weeks, CARTO will be rolling out the enhancements as part of its CARTO cloud native Location Intelligence platform and professional services offering.
Procedural founder Felix Palmer will join CARTO as Principal Rendering Engineer with a particular focus on the deck.gl and Procedural GL libraries. As well as improving the visualizations powering CARTO, he will work on the core of deck.gl, taking advantage of the latest browser APIs, such as WebGPU, to push performance to the next level. We have already collaborated in the past with great success – for example in building the integration between Google’s WebGL Maps and deck.gl – and look forward to pushing the possibilities of map rendering to new heights.
