Mapillary Vector Tiles
Today we're announcing the first version of our Mapillary data vector tiles. Vector tiles are the vector data equivalent of image tiles commonly used for web maps. The Mapillary data vector tiles encode image sequences and sequence properties in a neat format that doesn't need to be served from any database.
Data vector tiles
We are using the Mapbox vector tile format that uses protocol buffers to store the data efficiently. The data tiles have layers that the client can interact with, for example to do hover animations and show basic information.
Using these tiles requires your browser to support WebGL. Modern browsers support this, and there are mobile SDKs that work nicely.
Since these tiles just contain pure Mapillary data, and the styling and actions are decided by the client, you as a user can style and interact with the data any way you like! We hope to see many custom integrations using our data tiles in the future.
Part of our service offering
The tiles are already served fast globally behind a CDN. You can try them now if you like, the tile urls are:
https://t2.mapillary.com/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.mapbox
Our developer pages will have more details on using them soon, for now you can see them in action on our website. We will also make them available for our commercial users as part of paid plans, stay tuned.
Sharing
When making the switch to vector data tiles, @gyllen and I decided to write our own simple tools for generating these data tiles. This will be put into a lightweight framework that we are going to share, open sourced on our github page as soon as we can.
Send us your thoughts and feedback on Twitter and email.
/Jan Erik