Vizzualizing deforestation

Last summer, I had the chance to spend few hours with the guys of Vizzuality. They’re quite good doing time based visualizations, or “stories that matters”, as they’re used to say, and his product CartoDB is awesome for store, manage and query geospartial data.

So, because of it was a great opportunity to build something cool, we started to work together in order to make a 3D visualization of Indonisia deforestation in the last years.

The backend used was CartoDB through their SQL API and my CartoDB objective-C client. On the client side, we used and early version of WhirlyGlobe. It’s too bad some weeks after that, Steve Gifford released an easy-to-use component, so I had to fight with the codebase, which was a mess of C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++, pretty difficult to understand and adapt. Anyway, it seems it was not as bad as I thought, because as Steve said, “you’ve done some really advanced things and used some features even I rarely use.”

I’m pretty proud of the result, especially considering I spent two fulltime days and one week more doing 1-2 hours a day.

Here you can see it running in the iPad simulator:

Hope you like it!

UPDATE: Steve has highlighted this tiny project on his blog. I’m so honored and absolutely grateful!