11/04/2022 8:27:20 am, Dan

New full size, interactive live tracker

We finally deployed our most requested feature: full-size, interactive live tracking!

It works essentially the same as the standard activity viewer with a few differences. Before explaining those differences, we should explain how the activity viewer works first.

Activity viewer

Timeline

The most important part of the timeline is controling the current "time cursor". There are two ways to do this:

  • Press play. When viewing an activity for the first time, we recommend just waiting for the 3D view to load (there is a small loading indicator in the upper right) and pressing play.
  • Click, touch, or drag the large blue region. The blue region is an altitude plot over the course of the activity. Set the time by clicking, touching, or dragging on the area you're interested in.

Other elements of the timeline:

  • Activity title. Shown in the upper left.
  • Speed selectors. Click on the current speed (600x in the picture above) to set playback speed.
  • Distance scale. Miles traveled are shown along the top of the altitude plot.
  • Elapsed time scale. Elapse time is shown along the bottom of the altitude plot.
  • Start/end time. Local activity start and end time is shown on the bottom left and right.

Important note: many of the above elements are not shown when the timeline is on a small display like a mobile device.

3D view

When not in playback mode, you can manipulate the map like so:

  • Pan. Mouse: left-click and drag. Touch: single finger drag.
  • Zoom. Mouse: scroll wheel. Touch: two finger zoom motion motion.
  • Rotate. Mouse: right-click and drag to rotate and pitch. Touch: two finger rotation motion.

There are a variety of elements in the 3D view:

  • Track. The track is shown in blue. Light blue for the part of the track in the future and dark blue for the part already traveled. The time cursor that defines "past" and "future" can be manipulated on the timeline.
  • Mile markers. Mile markers are shown with the same light blue/dark blue treatment as above.
  • Current position. The position at the current time cursor is shown as an inverted orange triangle.
  • Pictures. We try to place several photos from every trip directly into the 3D scene by manually orienting the photo. You can click or press on a photo to view it.

Several statistics are shown above the timeline. These are all relative to the current time cursor. They are:

  • Time. Upper left, in local time.
  • Elasped time. Lower left, HH:MM:SS.
  • Altitude. Center, feet.
  • Distance. Upper right, miles.
  • Speed. Lower right, miles per hour.

Here's an activity you can explore.

Live tracker

The full size live tracker works mostly the same as the Activity Viewer with the following changes:

  • There are no pictures.
  • There are inverted triangle markers indicating the individual data points from the inReach. Standard points are in yellow and summit points are in green.
  • The time cursor will change to the most recent point when it arrives.
  • The time since last data point is shown in the upper right.

Because of the small number of data points (once every two minutes as most), mileage is likely to be significantly underestimated.