Rendering kepler.gl like heatmaps

[gerardsimons]

Hi there,

We would like to plot something like a heatmap on our maps. The beautiful examples shown at kepler.gl would be perfect.

I talked about this at the Slack channel with @twojtasz where he mentioned this would be an interesting question / challenge. If I understand correctly kepler.gl uses deck.gl as well for rendering data on a map so there might be some overlap.

Any idea if this is already possible with some trickery or when a more official collaboration is planned including examples? Or would my best bet be to use something else like custom layers ?

Thanks again.

[jlisee]

What is the data source you want to use to drive the heat maps? Could you use an image (uber/xviz#415) displayed in a flat plane with alpha providing the transparency where there is no data? Maybe with support for "raw" RGB images?

[gerardsimons]

Yes that would already help a lot. The data actually comes from a predictive model that outputs probability distributions (gaussian mixture model). We could pre-rasterize it into an image and send that over for now.

[gerardsimons]

Actually we decided to use the ColumnLayer with a point primitive which was quite easy to do as well. I can share a screenshot once it's pretty