Show HN: 3D Terrain simulation for hiking, skiing etc.

I love the examples on your site.

I tried it out but got this message: "Error Track does not contain Timing data."

It would be awesome if it could work on GPX files that don't contain timing data. I often want to visualize a planned route or verify if a GPX file I have downloaded from somewhere has any obvious problems.

If anyone wants to tinker with the Babylon.js code for the 3D visualizations, I made a standalone, sandbox-like repo, which is much easier to set up:

https://github.com/r-follador/CubeTrek_Babylon

Very cool.

I know this is not a related solution but just want to remind people that Google maps has a 3D mode. I do wonder if they are planning to get rid of it because they are burying it deep. you have to turn on "Globe View" and "Satellite"

https://i.postimg.cc/kMRMKvjc/Screenshot-2025-01-11-at-10-59...

This is really cool, just tried it with a recent hike ( https://cubetrek.com/view/362602 ). Strava has a really basic 3d visualization but it's from a fixed angle which isn't very useful. Being able to move around and the replay mode are really neat. I was confused a little about the flame effect on the route before I realized it was matching my mouse on the other charts.

I second the request to be able to visualize routes without timing, it'd be awesome to take some route I have planned out in caltopo and view it here.

Also it seems like not quite what you're aiming for but I already have a few places I can (and sometimes do) upload these for the sharing/community/diary aspect (strava and peakery) and it would be cool to have some sort of integration where I could visualize activities from there without having to download/upload the GPX. Maybe I really need some kind of GPX multiplexer to upload stuff from my GPS to all the different places it could go :).

For actual hikes / backcountry tours though (not just reviewing a recorded track, but helping plan before and orient in the terrain during) -- I've found an app creatively called "Maps 3D" to work best. You can download maps for offline use (handy in those places with no cell reception) and those often include common trails in the area.

The website looks great! My first thought was "I wonder if it has a docker-compose file?". Searched the repo for docker, nothing. Check the PRs. One open PR from October where someone dockerized it.

Please merge this! It makes it much easier for people to deploy it one their own devices and try it out.

This is awesome but would be way cooler if you showed a tiny 3d model of cyclist actually traveling the path in real time, with a timer and progress bar etc. People would LOVE to share these which is crucial to the growth of your site.

Ah! I've been tinkering on a very similar project off and on for years now. This is so awesome to see— really nice work. I've just never had time to actually polish mine off. I think the backend for processing new activities is broken at the moment, but the old demo activities are still around.

Ex: https://contour.run/home?activityId=36948814953

I've been using three.js and react-three-fiber for it. happy to swap notes! nice work :)

The 3D terrain stuff in FATMAP was great. I don't get why Strava killed it.

Very cool! I enjoyed watching my mountain hikes like this in the 30-day free Premium preview on Strava, but no way in hell am I paying $12 a month for a novelty feature.

It would be cool if you could manually add landmarks to the maps. For example, the names of peaks, towns, bodies of water, etc. It would be amazing if this could be pulled in automatically, but I don't know if there's a good public source of landmark data.

It would also be cool if you could automatically link your media to the GPS track, like photos and journal entries. They could be assigned to the correct spot in the track via their timestamp or geolocation data.

Any plan to increase the dimensions the 3d map can be generated for? This would be fun for motorcycle ADV trips but we tend to exceed the 100km squared limit.

I’ll try it on my ski tour tomorrow!

Great visuals! I loved to use fatmap to look at ski resorts and mountains in 3d to identify slope/terrain etc. Having ski resorts as 3d models I can check out would be an awesome use case!

This is really cool. I dont like the fire effect on the 3d view though.

This is really cool. I've been hacking around with Babylon lately and it's been a great pleasure.

Would love to see a casual game (on Switch) where I could upload ski runs and "ski" them...

How do you switch it to American? (ie feet/miles)

Can’t sign up now

Thank you thank you thank you!

I have as part of my mega-project, an attempt at making a to scale earth (I am using main branch, compiled daily Godot), but many of the datasets for elevation and sat photos I have looked at are gpl incompatible datasets. I'm not sure how I missed the NASA SRTM datasets, but they are public domain and thus gpl compat!

This is great news and I appreciate this very much! (your product is cool too!)

Now, turning the HGT data into an actual mesh is going to be the challenge, but it seems doable! Mapping elevation data to a sphere is sure to teach me some things...

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