Last week I mentioned some feedback I’d received from our HCI & Visualization team regarding the possibility of animating the heatmaps in the Types By Level UI. (Prior to this the Types By Level feature has really just been a legend for quick access to per-level heatmaps: I stopped short of attempting to animate the individual heatmaps while the timeline is playing.)
For some background, the Types By Level feature is a stack of “cards” that each displays data from a particular sensor type for a specific floor using a 2D heatmap. These cards are rendered as individual textures – using a single heatmap object to reduce the WebGLContexts that get created, as these are a scarce resource in browsers – which are then assembled into a stack of planes that gets rendered once again to display the UI. So there’s quite a lot going on, rendering-wise, and in all honesty I had very little expectation that any kind of animation would be meaningful.
But I gave it a try, because you…