“Walk on Air” app to enjoy virtual world travels from air
What’s “Walk on Air”?
“Walk on Air” is a web application that enables us to enjoy virtual world travels. You can go to your favorite places, your memorable places, or wander around aimlessly to see a beautiful 3D map as if you were walking on air.
Story behind the development
Mapbox, a mapping and location cloud platform, made a couple of outstanding enhancements of its map services in December 2020 to support 3D terrain for all the map and make new APIs, Camera API and Sky API available. In addition, Mapbox updated 135 million km² of high-resolution satellite imagery.
I’m actually working at Mapbox to develop and launch a new business in Japan (note: I’m not directly involved in the map service development or I’m not even an engineer.) Regardless whether or not I’m working at Mapbox, those updates were very attractive to me as one of big map fans.
I always try to book and sit on the window side to look outside from the window when I take a flight. However, due to the COVID situation, I’ve never taken the flight for almost a year or even I’ve not traveled anywhere inside my country, Japan. I used a sample Mapbox application to be able to see beautiful 3D maps. It was really awesome. However, I found it a little bit difficult to navigate the map by my mac’s trackpad to find the best spot to see scenes from my favorite angle... I used to be a software engineer for consumer electronics devices 15+ years ago but I rarely made any programming for a long time. But I decided to develop my own application to support “keyboard” operations to adjust the view position more easily and flexibly — That is “Walk on Air”, which enables me to be “walking on air” literally ;-)
Though the app is still a beta version, it demonstrates the Mapbox’s new features well. I decided to disclose it to get anybody who has the same interest as me to enjoy the virtual travel experiences.
Key bindings
We can use “Keyboard” to move around on the application. Here is the key bindings:
[Basic]
Up: Go forward
Down: Go backward
Right: Turn right
Left: Turn left
E: Pitch down
D: Pitch up
G: Go upward
B: Go downward
[Optional]
T: Tele (zoom-in)
W: Wide (zoom-out)
S: Go left horizontally
F: Go right horizontally
H: Go upward a little
N: Go downward a little
[Display options]
P: Enable/Disable to show Navigation control
Q: Show/Hide Labels
L: Switch Language (Browser language → English → Japanese)
[Time option for Sun and Sky]: Simulate a real Sun position for today
1: Sunrise
2: Morning
3: Afternoon
4: Evening
5: Sunset
9: Current time (based on device)
0: Default (Sun at Zenith)
“Walk on Air” for Smartphone | by Mouse or Trackpad
I prepared another “Walk on Air” to support smartphones or mouse/trackpad operations below.
Sample screenshots
Following screenshots are taken on “Walk on Air”. I have visited all the following places. Those screenshots through the app reminded me of the feeling when I visited. Especially for the Ayers Rock, I climbed to see the sunrise on the top 25+ years ago. “Walk on Air” app calculate the actual sun position of today to show it on the map based on the time option set.
Hope I’ll go those places again after the COVID situation gets settled soon.
