Map tiles comin’ in hot
By Justin Braaten, Developer Relations and Nate Schmitz, Software Engineer, Google Earth Engine
Do you have a need, a need for speed-y map tile loads? We hope the answer is “yes!”, because today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of FeatureView assets, Earth Engine’s newest data type for rapid rendering of vector datasets.
A FeatureView is a view-only, accelerated visualization of a FeatureCollection with more control over styling and rendering characteristics. Unlike a FeatureCollection, whose map tiles are generated on the fly, FeatureView tiles are pre-computed, allowing the tiles to begin transferring to the application immediately upon request.
Enhanced styling
A FeatureView provides more comprehensive and flexible styling capabilities than a FeatureCollection. The styling system lets you set broad style rules that apply to large groups of features, and specific rules for particular features. Feature style can be defined by constant values or data driven, based on feature attributes.
The following is a sample of the rich FeatureView styling schema, used here to symbolize power plants based on fuel types and electrical generating capacity. The styling arguments can be changed on the fly, so add slider and selector widgets to your Earth Engine Apps to allow users to filter data and customize its appearance for more engaging and insightful exploration.
Customizable rendering
A FeatureView asset is created by exporting a FeatureCollection. On export, you can set several options that specify feature thinning strategy, max number of features per tile, and overlapping feature display order. Use these parameters to optimize the rendering characteristics of your dataset.
You can export any of your personal FeatureCollection assets or those from the Earth Engine Data Catalog. We’ve already exported all suitable Data Catalog assets with what we think are broadly applicable settings. When you visit FeatureCollection Catalog pages, look for the import snippet and code sample to get started using existing FeatureView layers. You can also find import options and links to code samples from the asset dialog that appears when browsing datasets from the Code Editor’s search bar.
The FeatureView data type grew out of our desire to make vector data in Earth Engine Apps super polished. Fast tile loads and display optimization significantly improves user experience, and for App developers, the styling system and expressive schema makes creating visualizations intuitive and fun.
Thanks for coming along on this announcement of FeatureView assets, you can learn more about this new data type on our FeatureView overview page. We can’t wait to see what you build!
