Rerun

Visualize geospatial data

Rerun 0.20 introduced a new map view. This guide provides a short overview on how to use it to visualise geospatial data.

Coordinate system coordinate-system

The map view uses the ESPG:3857 spherical mercator projection commonly used by web services such as OpenStreetMap. This enables the use of commonly available web tiles for the background map.

To be compatible with this view, geospatial data must be expressed using ESPG:4326 (aka WGS84) latitudes and longitudes. This corresponds to what is commonly referred to as "GPS coordinates." Rerun provides a set of archetypes prefixed with Geo designed to encapsulate such data.

For example, GeoPoints represent a single geospatial location (or a batch thereof). The location of the Eiffel Tower can be logged as follows:

rr.log("eiffel_tower", rr.GeoPoints(lat_lon=[48.858222, 2.2945]))

Both the latitude and longitude must be provided in degrees, with positive values corresponding to the North, resp. East directions.

Note that Rerun always expects latitudes first and longitudes second. As there is no accepted ordering standard, our APIs strive to make this ordering choice as explicit as possible. In this case, the lat_lon argument is keyword-only and must thus be explicitly named as a reminder of this order.

Types of geometries types-of-geometries

Rerun currently supports two types of geometries:

Note: polygons are planned but are not supported yet (see this issue).

As in other views, radii may be expressed either as UI points (negative values) or scene units (positive values). For the latter case, the map view uses meters are scene units.

Apart from the use of latitude and longitude, GeoPoints and GeoLineStrings are otherwise similar to the Points2D and LineStrip2D archetypes used in the 2D view.

Using Mapbox background maps using-mapbox-background-maps--nolint-

The map view supports several types of background maps, including a few from Mapbox. A Mapbox access token is required to use them. It must be provided either using the RERUN_MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable or configured in the settings screen ("Settings…" item in the Rerun menu). An access token may be freely obtained by creating a Mapbox account.

Creating a map view from code creating-a-map-view-from-code

Like other views, the map view can be configured using the blueprint API:

import rerun.blueprint as rrb

blueprint = rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.MapView(
        origin="/robot/position",
        name="map view",
        zoom=16.0,
        background=rrb.MapProvider.OpenStreetMap,
    ),
)

Check the map view reference for details.

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