Lanes are critical features on high resolution maps for automotive and mobility. You can use Mapbox Studio to style custom lane designs to fit your needs. Here’s a clean style that keeps all lanes prominent while highlighting the route line:

Use filters in Studio to highlight particular turn lanes, like in this dark style:

A custom style coupled with 3D buildings gives you a realistic effect:

Explore these three styles in this demo:

Interested in styling lane maps? Reach out to me on @rasagy to know more.

The Mapbox Unity SDK has full support for global digital elevation data in Unity. Our SDK ships with elevation encoded raster tiles from our global tiled digital elevation model that, together with mesh generation factories, can be used to generate hillshades and elevation contour lines for any location in the world.

The SDK includes many geospatial convenience functions to help translate between the real world and Unity space. One of these functions helps to decode the elevation tiles from RGB pixel values to height in meters.

Once decoded, you can generate a 3D mesh model that can be used as a canvas for different types of visual experiences. Here’s an example of where I used contour lines of the Mapbox terrain layer to create a Tron-like atmosphere:

The contour lines are fully customizable in Unity, so you can change them to have any look and feel you want.

Here, I used Mapbox Satellite as a texture overlaid on top of our elevation mesh model. Then, on top, I extruded road networks and buildings from our Mapbox Streets layer to create a realistic 3D flyover of San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Park, the Grand Canyon, and Monument Valley. This is what you would see if you were flying at a height of 500 feet over these areas:

There are so many possibilities of what you could build with our new tools for 3D terrain. Peter posted yesterday about how we’re pushing the boundaries of 3D with WebGL and Three.js, and we’re excited to push forward with similar work for Unity developers.

Need inspiration to start building something of your own? Explore the world in 3D, and hit us up on Twitter to show us what you’ve made!

Welcome Jordan Kiley to Mapbox! Jordan joins our mobile team, where she’ll be supporting our users as they build great apps and contributing to the development of our iOS SDK.

Jordan comes to Mapbox via the Flatiron School in New York City, though she’s recently switched coasts and taken up residence in San Francisco.

Welcome, Jordan!

Last year, Visualize No Malaria, a partnership between Zambia’s Ministry of Health, PATH, Tableau Foundation, and a coalition of tech partners, mapped 99% of buildings in Livingstone District, Zambia to help make the country malaria-free by 2020. In just two months, volunteers from all over the world contributed to the map, directly contributing to malaria elimination efforts.

Visualize No Malaria recently kicked off phase two of its mapping effort to support Zambia’s malaria elimination. You can be a part of this mission too by tracing buildings from the satellite imagery provided by DigitalGlobe, and uploading it to OpenStreetMap. Check out Visualize No Malaria’s blog post for a step-by-step walk through to get involved.

Meanwhile, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and DigitalGlobe have teamed up to identify and map populated places in over 500,000 square kilometers of Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America to support the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s malaria program. This area completely overlaps with the focus area of Visualize No Malaria, and the next phase of mapping addresses the needs of both PATH and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Working together in OpenStreetMap, it’s simple to collaborate and map together to create more data faster.

Using OpenStreetMap data and geographical factors like elevation, rainfall, and temperature data, the Visualize No Malaria team creates models to predict the likely location and timing of malaria outbreaks, and scale up interventions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance of malaria.

We’re looking forward to continue working with and supporting this important project. Find out more ways you can get involved on PATH’s blog post.

Do you belong to or know an amazing mapping community in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America/Caribbean, or Africa? Or are you working in development, and want to get started with Open Mapping? The HOT Microgrants Program is providing community groups with funding and support to foster growth and impactful projects.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team responds to emergencies and organizes resiliency and development projects. Everything relies on strong local communities to partner in the creation, validation, and use of mapping data. Growing and sustaining local mapping communities is a big challenge, taking time, resources, and guts. This fund is designed to help, with both money and mentorship on project design and organizational development.

Mapbox was proud to donate to this fund with a $10K matching grant. Check it out and apply by March 12! If you have any questions, reach out to HOT and feel free to bounce ideas off me on Twitter.

What better way to get a head start on grilling season than mapping your favorite picnic sites! Last week Ajith and I updated OpenStreetMap’s in-browser editor to bundle the latest Maki icons. This refresh includes new icons for recycling, horseback riding, and even a fun grill icon.

To get started, place points on the map showing the location of all the amenities: picnic tables, grills, waste baskets, recycling containers. To add a new point, click the Point button, or press 1.

This is easy, but picking the preset type for each point can get tedious. To speed things up, let’s use ⌘C and ⌘V (or Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V on Windows/Linux) to quickly copy and paste the picnic site features.

Can we go even faster? Yes! Copy and paste with ⌘C and ⌘V works on groups of features too. Hold down Shift to draw a lasso around some features, and copy them all in seconds!

OpenStreetMap’s in-browser editor makes contributing easy and fun, even if you have never mapped before. If you’re new to OpenStreetMap, get on the map to register and get started.

Follow me on Twitter for more news and tips about mapping on OpenStreetMap.

Smaller cities are stretching their resources by joining efforts with their neighbors on smart cities initiatives. With this new approach, these cities can still benefit from the agility of working as small teams while executing projects at a scale usually seen by larger metropolises.

The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) in the United Kingdom is one of these new combined legal entities, and we’re excited to announce the WMCA as our next Mapbox Cities featured partner. I’m looking forward to learning about the opportunities and challenges facing the Combined Authority, which includes Birmingham, Wolverhampton, and Coventry, along with the surrounding metropolitan boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, and Walsall.

Supporting the UK’s largest transport infrastructure project

Mapbox Cities and West Midlands will work together to help prepare the region for High Speed 2 (HS2), the UK’s largest transport infrastructure project. The highly anticipated HS2 project will be a catalyst for the region’s economic growth and is expected to be completed by 2026. The WMCA is preparing for the project’s construction challenges by combining historic traffic and transport data with geospatial data on planned disruptions and even real-time transport data.

HS2 is not the only project in the works to kick-start a new era of transport in the West Midlands. With the recent launch of the proof-of-concept platform ‘Whim’ the WMCA became the first region in the UK to pilot Mobility as a Service (MaaS) for its residents. The West Midlands Strategic Transport Plan, Movement for Growth, even outlines the commitment to “creating a transport system befitting a sustainable, attractive, and economically vibrant conurbation”. As a company built on open standards, we know the benefits of open data first hand. I was thrilled to read that “Open Data principles will be universally adopted to ensure the market can react, adapt, and develop those tools through new business models.” Private companies are getting involved, too. Jaguar Land Rover plans to start testing connected and autonomous vehicles around its headquarters in Coventry.

“It is a real achievement for us to have been selected against global competition for this prestigious pilot partnership, and our team is very excited to be working with an organisation of Mapbox’s stature,” said Martin Reeves, WMCA chief executive. “The combined authority was created in the spirit of innovation and we are delighted by this fresh approach to addressing the challenge and opportunity for our region that is High Speed 2.”

Are you interested in Mapbox Cities or our work with WMCA? Then subscribe to Mapbox Cities updates and follow us on Twitter.

Monday marks the start of the Congressional recess, when many voters across the country will talk with their representatives in person at town hall meetings. I teamed up with Dylan from Development Seed to take the Town Hall Project’s amazing volunteer-compiled data and borrowed some work by our friends at GovTrack to build a congressional district-based town hall event map.

I am so encouraged by the recent upswell of small-d democratic participation, and during this recess it’s so important for people across the political spectrum to get involved – even if their representatives don’t. Living in Washington D.C., I don’t have a representative to meet at a town hall. So, I want to help as many voters as possible go to theirs by putting some of the basic geometries of our democracy to work. What are you going to ask your representative?

We just updated our satellite imagery for one of the biggest cities in the world – Shanghai. Let me show you some of this fresh data:

The old and new financial districts are at the center of the city. West of the river is the historic Bund; on the east is Lujiazui, with its enormous skyscrapers. Four of the towers are well over 400 m (1300 ft) high and qualify as “supertall.”

Zooming in around People’s Park in Huangpu District. The building in the middle of the park is City Hall. There’s also an opera house, a Michelin three-star restaurant, and the May Thirtieth Movement Monument in this view. Huangpu is one of the densest neighborhoods in the world.

It’s not just downtown that we’ve refreshed. The update covers 163,394 km² of Shanghai and Jiangsu – about 63,000 square miles. If the area of this update were its own nation, it would be just ahead of Australia in GDP, at about $1.5 trillion per year, and right behind Japan in population, with more than 100,000,000 people. It’s one of the fastest-developing places in the world, with construction everywhere. Shanghai Disneyland opened last year:

Or take Hongqiao Railway Station, next to Hongqiao International Airport – ten years ago it didn’t exist, but now it’s the largest train station in Asia, with a solar panel roof and high speed rail connections to the rest of China:

Zoom in and you can find a bullet train headed toward Beijing:

Some of our favorite details are outside the built-up areas. We noticed these boats gathered near aquaculture beds in Luoma Lake, by the Grand Canal in Suqian:

We identified the greater Shanghai area as an update priority with help from aggregated telemetry density statistics, which highlighted the metropolis as one of the most heavily used places on our map. We decided it would be the perfect place to kick off a new series of wide-area satellite imagery updates. You’ll see more soon!

Over the last few months our Android team has been getting ready for the launch of Android Wear 2.0. The Mapbox Android SDK includes full support for Android Wear 2.0 and is designed for the unique needs of wearable users. We can’t wait to see what wearable developers come up with.

Powering the Casio WSD-F20 smart outdoor watch

One of the wearables using Mapbox on Android Wear 2.0 is Casio’s upcoming Smart Outdoor Watch.

The PRO TREK Smart WSD-F20, due to come out in April, is Casio’s second smart watch. It runs on Android Wear 2.0 and is equipped with low-power GPS and richly-designed and easy-to-read map data from Mapbox. These maps can be downloaded in advance and used without any kind of cellular or internet connection. With the WSD-F20, people will be able to customize the watch’s map style based on the outdoor activity of their choice, such as trekking, cycling, fishing, winter sports, and watersports.

Additionally, people can add markers and text to the maps to show the locations that matter most to them, like a great viewpoint on a hike or a good fishing spot.

Offline first

Outdoor explorers often rely on wearables, especially when they are in remote backcountry areas. Developers want to provide the best user experience even when there’s limited or non-existent network connectivity.

In addition to offline mapping, all of the regular features of Mapbox’s Android SDK are available on Android Wear 2.0. That means you can map with any of our predefined styles (streets, dark, light, outdoors, satellite, and satellite streets) or create your own style.

See our documentation for an example on how to download a map for offline use.

Try it today

We’ve also updated our Android Demo App to support Android Wear devices, so download it today from the Play Store to start using our maps on your wrist. As usual, we’ve open-sourced the code for the new wearable module.

Welcome Randall Jackson, as VP of Sales! Randall is leading our sales team, running right next to me on the business side of the house.

Not many people wake up in the morning wanting to buy an NoSQL database. Randall’s leadership at MongoDB, MarkLogic, and Swiftstack changed that. He stays focused on the needs of the customers and crafting solutions, rather than getting caught up in how cool the tech is. Randall’s roots as an engineer — combined with his last 15 years in enterprise sales — give him a blend of perspective to take care of our technical enterprise partners integrating location and mapping into their applications.

We’re building our technical sales team to stay close to developers — being the front line that gets our tools live and building the relationships to help us prioritize product feedback with engineering. Randall’s ability to tell a story helps us package product and better communicate all the new functionality that the team is shipping.

And he rocks a fedora.

Whether you’ve built with Mapbox Studio before or you’re not sure where to start, the new Mapbox Studio Manual is your guide to creating beautiful custom map styles. From a simple walk through of the Mapbox Studio interface to detailed conceptual explanations, we documented everything.

Learn how our maps work

Throughout the manual, you’ll learn more about the concepts and vocabulary that you need to understand how to use Mapbox Studio as a suite of tools. Start with the Introduction for an overview of how Mapbox works and how styles, tilesets, and datasets relate to each other.

Dig into documentation

The manual is the comprehensive technical documentation for Mapbox Studio. If you’ve already started building with Mapbox Studio, you can use the manual to dig into the many features of Mapbox Studio that allow you to make a map style to your exact specifications. The manual is your reference for working with uploads, styles, datasets, and more.

Start building

If you’re new to Mapbox Studio, start with the Tutorials section to hit the ground running with a collection of step-by-step guides. Whether you are looking to create a map style that matches your brand or add custom data to one of our template styles, we’ve created guides to walk you through the process of creating your first map.

Take a look at the new Mapbox Studio Manual and start building today!

Few people know the mapping industry as well as Marc Prioleau. He was a crucial early advisor to our team as we raised our first round of investment. After a stint at Uber, Marc is coming home to our business development team bringing decades of experience.

Marc comes back to Mapbox at a critical time. Maps are no longer add-on features — they’re core to mobile products like Uber. Our platform based on a fusion of open data and realtime user feedback makes it possible for any developer to have constantly improving maps, location search, and traffic-aware directions in their app.

I am super excited to have Marc on our team. Things are about to get very interesting.

Motive.io, a platform for building location-based games, just launched with the latest version of the Mapbox Unity SDK. Here is how I used it to quickly create an augmented reality “Ghost Hunter” game.

To get started, I began by creating a base map in Mapbox Studio and styled it to match the exact look and feel of my game.

Styling the base map in Mapbox Studio.

Next, I used the Motive.io authoring tool to generate a catalog of items like batteries, food, hammers, and wood for game players to collect from real-world locations to hunt ghosts that are menacing their city.

Author in-game content like collectibles, characters, media, and more using Motive.io’s web-based authoring tool. Content is downloaded to your game on demand, which means you can add and tweak content even after release.

After I created my catalog, I assigned these items to real-world places using the Motive.io script editor. Using Motive.io and Mapbox’s location data, you can assign items to different types of locations (like restaurants or parks) along with a probability for how often the items will spawn in those places.

Motive.io’s script authoring tool lets you program complex gameplay with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Like all other game content, scripts are downloaded on demand.

I then followed a similar procedure to place ghosts in the game world that players hunt in the real-world. The Motive.io script authoring tool gives you control over where, when, and how the characters are placed. For instance, I could have a particular over-caffeinated ghoul appear only at coffee shops on rainy Tuesday afternoons, and due to Mapbox’s global location data, this works anywhere in the world.

Now, let’s run the game and see what we get! The Motive.io engine and server automatically sync with Mapbox map data and infrastructure so you get the latest game content at runtime. The Unity template that you create with Motive.io gives you controls and annotations out of the box.

Motive.io’s Unity templates make it easy to quicky create a game environment.

That’s it! In just a few clicks I created a location-based Ghost Hunter game! Check out Motive.io for more information, and stay tuned for some big announcements from them coming up at GDC 2017!

Going to GDC? Stop by Mapbox’s booth, #2330 in the South Hall Expo, to check out live mobile demos and walk through the code of the Mapbox Unity SDK. In the meantime make sure to download the SDK here.

As of today, you can add custom overlays to your static maps when making requests to the Static API. This is useful in situations where JavaScript is not available or if you’re trying to keep your UI light. Take for example a ride sharing app that sends a receipt to the user. In the receipt email they can show the route, pickup location, and dropoff location all with a single Static API request.

Ride sharing receipt example. View request.

The Static API allows for 4 different types of overlays: GeoJSON styled with the simplestyle-spec, Maki marker, custom marker, or an encoded polyline. A single request can have a combination of overlay types and allows up to 100 features.

Since this is Mapbox GL under the hood, it’s possible to change where the overlay ends up in the style’s layer hierarchy. By specifying the query parameter before_layer, the overlays will be inserted before the specified layer in the style. This is great for putting data under labels.

Choropleth map with polygons underneath the labels on. View request.

Show a user their morning commute with live traffic.

Highlighting parks in San Francisco, CA. View request.

Dark map with Maki markers icons, custom colors, and a custom rocket marker. View request.

To get started with overlays on your static maps, check out the Static API documentation.

We are pleased to launch the Mapbox Unity SDK at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. We’re bringing global real world map layers, search, and directions to location-based games and AR/VR applications in one easy to use package.

Tap into layers of buildings, streets, places, water bodies, elevation, and aerial imagery to generate open worlds for location-based games or simulate real world action. Use traffic based directions to guide players, or use geocoding to search for places and display location names in your game.

Everyone can now download the Mapbox Unity SDK and start building. A huge thank you to the big developer community who has helped shape the SDK while it was in private beta. While developing the SDK we’ve been having fun ourselves building demos - check out the screenshots and videos below.

If you’re planning to use location in Unity, we’d love to hear from you. Hit us up on Twitter via the tag #BuiltWithMapbox and if you’re in San Francisco for GDC, stop by our booth 2330 in the South Hall.

Build open world location-based games, with real world place data.

Build navigation meshes with real world terrain data like Mt Fuji in this example.

Create styled cityscapes like this night-themed view of Manhattan.

Combine elevation layers and satellite to explore our beautiful planet.

Generate Minecraft-inspired worlds from real world terrain and land use data.

Combine carefully crafted Mapbox Studio styles like this hand drawn design with 3D building data.

Integrate our Geocoding and Directions API’s to find places and route between them.

Use our traffic layer for color coding and vehicle traffic generation.

Use generative textures on buildings to quickly build Sim City like experiences with real world map data.

Combine global terrain, satellite, and street vector data for flight simulations and more.

Bloomington, Indiana, has a great track record when it comes to open source software. Bloomington’s Open311 uReport and GeoReporter tools are used by several other cities. Its inRoads app for sharing open data on road and sidewalk closures is available as an open source project on Bloomington’s Github page. It’s no wonder they were finalists at the Code for America Awards back in 2015. We’re excited to have them as a partner for Mapbox Cities.

With a population of 84,000, Bloomington is smaller than our other featured partners, Melbourne and the West Midlands Combined Authority. This gives us a chance to work with a diverse set of cities and learn about their unique challenges.

Intersection at the new Bloomington Transit Station and Joint 911 Dispatch Center

Together, we’ll work on displaying the city’s geospatial open data more visually. We will support Bloomington’s IT and GIS team in building an interactive display of historical preservation requirements for its buildings, combined with stories and background information that goes all the way back to when the city was established in 1818.

Open source code is essential to projects with geospatial data in a public service context. Cities need to create even more open projects to share existing smart solutions with each other. Mapbox Cities supports municipalities to build more open source tools with local data and we will share the new tools with other cities out there.

Are you working for a city and are interested in joining Mapbox Cities? Then subscribe to Mapbox Cities updates and follow us on Twitter.

We’re very excited to announce four new team members here at Mapbox! Read along to meet Shannon, Anthony, Alex, and Dominic and find out what they’ll be working on.

Shannon Myricks - Operations

Shannon will be on operations, supporting our growing team across offices. She’s taking care of our internal systems, the day-to-day needs of the team, and team travel. Shannon will be based out of our San Francisco office, and is the one making sure our spaces are amazing as we scale.

Prior to joining Mapbox, Shannon was the Deputy Operations Director at Hillary for America, leading the buildout of 14 campaign offices in Central Pennsylvania and managing all logistics and operations. She has a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication/Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Anthony Jones - Business

Anthony is on the business team and will be based in DC. He’ll be helping with Mapbox’s ever expanding sales and partnership efforts.

Anthony joins us from Discover Technologies, where he helped federal and commercial organizations deploy collaborative business applications for employees with disabilities. Originally from Boston, Anthony graduated from the University of Maryland College Park with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and US Latino Studies. In his free time, Anthony enjoys playing golf and basketball and is an amateur ornithologist.

Alex Paralto - Cartography

A big welcome to Alex, who is joining our San Francisco office! Alex joins the cartography team where he will work on our core map styles, design custom maps, and help improve our map design tools.

Alex comes to Mapbox from the Maryland Institute College of Art where he studied graphic design and worked with Younts Design Inc. and The Baltimore Museum of Art.

Dominic Bonalanza Cordon - Operations

Dominic joined the operations team! He’ll be based out of our San Francisco office and will be handling everything from managing vendors, planning our weekly lunches, supporting team travel, to making sure our space looks amazing.

Before Mapbox, Dominic worked in recruiting at Medallia and worked his way into facilities, where he maintained a 90,000 sq ft building and saw the company grow from 300 to 1,000 employees. When he’s not working, Dominic is an avid baker and cook, spending his time creating new recipes (ask him about his avocado cookies). He’s a huge comic fan and loves to play video games. He has a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communications with an emphasis in graphic design.

We’ve just refreshed our satellite imagery for two beautiful Canadian cities, Toronto and Vancouver.

Here’s a bit of central Vancouver, showing the shiny geodesic dome of the Science World museum, the 2010 Olympic Village across the bottom left, and the bridge-shaped Central building southeast of center:

CN Tower in Toronto, with the aquarium and Rogers Centre at its foot – and the SkyWalk to Union Station:

Explore the new satellite photos to find details like rafts of fresh-cut logs floating just offshore of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver:

Or zoom in on the Crystal, the controversial Deconstructivist addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, near Queen’s Park in Toronto:

Toronto and Vancouver are just two of many satellite updates that we’re working on this month. Keep reading the blog to see more, and if you have any questions, get in touch – I’m @jqtrde on Twitter.

“Grow your role enough so that when you hire your replacement, they’re 10x as good as you.”

I first heard that that definition of entrepreneurial success from Tom Kalil, one of President Obama’s top advisors on tech, shortly after I joined the administration. This philosophy of building teams was key to my early conversations with Eric when I came to Mapbox two years ago as our first in-house counsel. Today, legal at Mapbox is a team of three — and I’m now thrilled to welcome Sai Sriskandarajah to lead this team as VP of Legal. Sai is going to take our legal work to the next level, reporting directly to Eric as part of the executive team.

Sai joins us from Twitter, where he led the data licensing legal team. Before that, he was General Counsel at Peel Technologies, on the technology transactions teams at Intel and Gunderson Dettmer, and a litigator at Clifford Chance. Somewhere in between all of this, Sai got a master’s in digital art and design at NYU.

As for me, I’m transitioning into my new role as VP of Data, supporting our teams to source the best data in the world for our platform; whether that’s increasing our investment in open communities, sourcing directly from governments, or engaging in strategic partnerships.

Welcome to Mapbox, Sai!