See Sailing - sailing performance visualisation

[RantyDave]

I’ve been working on visualising sailing performance. I take the data already on the boat’s network (works like the one in cars), parse it, do some analysis, and post it up to a web app. Obviously this is very heavily reliant on threejs

I’m pretty much done with the graphics engine side. It holds 60fps nicely on mid-level hardware, presents a lot of the data as transparent streams in ‘reality’ (the green ribbon with red bits represents boat speed), and renders terrain out to about 30km using a two level system: close terrain gets individual facets and per-vertex normals; larger distances are made with big lumps and a normal map.

The boat itself is a ‘NURBSSurface’. Chosen because this is how they are modelled in the ‘real world’.

Scenes overall are in the 50k-100k triangles range and take 100-150 draw calls. Some work went into getting these numbers down.

Have a look! Give it a go!

See-Sailing, yacht data visualisation

-Dave

[PavelBoytchev]

I like it how the numbers flip when the camera rotates.

Questions:

• Would it make sense if there is some “grid” drawn on the surface (e.g. 1 grid unit = 10 meters)? Currently, when the boat moves in open sea it is impossible to grasp visually its speed, because there is no static reference point. Alternatively there might be some markers along its trajectory.
• Will this app work for boats in rivers? Boats’ altitudes will change as they go down; and boats’ motions will be sharper and more abrupt.

[RantyDave]

You’re not the first person to point out that the altitude isn’t always zero. Rivers are a thing, but lakes are a bigger thing. I have bigger problems to solve right now.

The motions are captured from the boats themselves - they’re actually a byproduct of a decent quality digital compass.