Mapbox

What do you like best?

The custom data and custom model for buildings. For instance, we used our green roof data as an additional layer on top of the default building layer.

Point of Interests is very helpful, because we can use our data and prefabs to render certain data visualization. For example, we used our tree data set and used Point of Interests to show the trees in New York. We made our prefab of the trees and it was pretty great result.

The integration with AR Core and AR Kit makes it easy to use as AR product

What do you dislike?

The documentation is handy and user friendly but there is not enough official tutorials, and there is no API references of the sdk. The most tutorial I learned was from Youtube tutorials. Also, when adjusting the zoom level, the buildings lost is not satisfying. When you set the zoom level to some certain level, part of the buildings are just disappear. This may because to keep the frames when running so that it's not too heavy for the device to render so many buildings, but the lost buildings are too many and not expected. Besides, when adding multiple maps, it is still heavy to load. Maybe there is some way to reduce the cost like optimize the shader and reduce the mesh of the buildings.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Mapbox is a great tool for making geographical or geological products including AR, Games and data visualization

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We were building a AR urban data visualization by using Mapbox. Mapbox has a great default building dataset, and we can also use our data and customize the shader on the buildings. It is integrated with AR Core and AR Kit, so no need to worry about those.