Google Maps Platform | Q&A

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello everybody my name is mike pegg and i lead the developer relations team for uh google maps platform here at google and we're really excited to be here with you today i have some members of the team here uh we're gonna answer some questions have a little bit of fun uh so i've introduced myself i'll hand it over to alicia hi everyone i'm alicia sullivan i'm the product manager for cloud-based map styling thanks go ahead uh my name is tim soprani uh i'm the engineering lead on cloud-based map styling for google maps platform and i'm travis mcveil i'm the engineering elite for maps on the google maps platform and really looking forward to answering your questions today thank you travis and thank you teams and alicia we'll we'll get started here first of all hope you're having a great i o we're here on day two kind of closing out day two so i won't say afternoon because i know some some if not most watching or not in an afternoon sort of time time frame right now so uh yeah let's let's dive in uh we've got some great questions from a number of you that have posted uh we're really excited to dive in here so let's get started with the first question uh this one comes from ben and he asks is there a way to dynamically set map ids so that styling can change without having to reload the whole map and maybe uh teams did you want to take this one yeah i can take this one um thank you ben for your question um we uh love to hear more uh about your use case and please feel free to use the public issue tracker to help us learn more about it so for those of you who don't know map id is basically the identifier that you create from the cloud console that serves pretty much as a link between your uh map object and your apps to um the map style that you manage in the cloud um and this makes you know this allows you to push style changes without changing any code um to ben's question uh the map id is deeply integrated with the map object life cycle so currently we don't yet support uh dynamically switching uh map id on a single map object and we understand that uh you know this dynamic use case uh would uh open up a lot of um new uses of of our our service and and we're we will have that and we're exploring how we can meaningfully help you achieve some of your use cases thank you excellent thank you james we'll move on to the next question that comes from maria in the webgl talk you acknowledge that webgl can be pretty complicated to work with are you working on anything else to make using webgl with maps easier travis is it difficult to work with webgl so i'm a graphics person so i i'm going to have a mixed answer there so on one hand yes it can be complex but the benefits are magnificent in the process so thank you maria for your question we are working very much on webgl state transition work especially when it comes to making sure that the there's great compatibility between live 3d graphics libraries like 3gs and our javascript maps api so we are continuing uh continually refining gl state transitions there and we're also working on an oss 3d marker library which should be coming very soon because this is a very common ui pattern that we really want to make easy for developers cool i'm going to ask you a follow-up question travis you said that you're a graphics person and you uh you find there's a benefit to it what is that uh what's that moment when you're working within let's say webgl but what's that what's that moment where you're working with something and and you do feel that benefit you know at what point in the cycle would you say that comes um so i feel that benefit immediately like just as a i've have a background and special effects in gaming and it's always been a desire to be able to move the google maps experience beyond this top down kind of 2d north up base map that everyone like knows and loves and has a lot of utility for for developers around the world but just being able to the second that you really break open that tilt and rotation barrier and start to assess and like leverage the power of like the programmatic camera control you really start to feel uh that this is a different type of base map experience than what you're accustomed to at least on the web and then couple that with just uh webgl overlays you really now you really have the power to really bring 3d content directly to the same base map that you use every day and just your daily use of maps like google.com totally agree and i think without tilt and rotation you know you literally only see one dimension you know to what you're talking about right so yeah it's a real aha moment um some of the demos that we have up uh really show you know the the benefit it was certainly an aha moment for me you know seeing the markers um in three dimensions and those those kinds of things that was certainly the break over for me for sure yep yeah where you can kind of look at a horizon level instead of directly straight down on something that you know it's there but then as soon as you move it it sort of lights up for you yeah excellent okay let's move to the to the next question it's from laureen if i'm saying that correctly are there any options for organizations like non-profits disaster response schools etc to use your platform without being charged um i think i think i can probably take this one um so lorraine we do have programs that do offer credits just just as background the way our service is offered you set up a just a billing account with a credit card and some information so that uh as your usage um is used um you know it's it's it's billed according to that usage uh we do know that in some cases such as disaster response uh or some high volume uh incidents that might be happening where the map is being used um that usage can can be driven up and we want to definitely offer programs and assistance and help in those cases so we do have what we call public programs you can either search just just search google for google maps platform public programs or in the documentation in our docs you can look for public programs we have credits available through an application for non-profits organizations involved in in crisis response and disaster relief uh teaching faculty and educational settings uh news media as well there's an entire news media program where we work directly with media partners uh and developers in some cases as well for specific use cases so just go on that page on on the public programs page um and uh you can you can apply for for some of those programs we've we've been heavily involved in in helping with covet 19 response through through various programs there as well so yeah so please please check that out um okay we'll move on to rohit's question where he asks what are the limitations to cloud-based uh map styling i took a look and there's a lot of options there to sort through are there any parts of the map that aren't supported for custom styling right now um maybe alicia if you can take this one sure happy to take that um thank you for the question um as far as cloud-based styling you know this is the first launch of this product and you know we really were focusing on enabling a simple user you know interface and also enabling some new features like our poi filtering and density control as far as limitations i mean as compared to json based styling there are a few i think some of you might be familiar with being able to modify styling kind of dynamically by replacing a string in the style you can't do that right now in cloud-based styling but um and there's also a few features that don't have parity like so there's certain aspects of the map that you can't access customization for but we are working to build on the foundation that we have and you know try to give more advanced options and we'd actually really love to hear about your use cases and feedback in the public issue tracker because that will help inform you know what we focus on next yeah i can also add as well that the the amount of real world information is in google maps is large and uh you know it's it's a we and we really had to prioritize you know giving the best value that we can to uh the customers right now and and we've you know prioritized a few key uh uh um features like obviously cloud-based maps are being able to uh make changes without uh pushing new code and we also focus on other types of features that would allow you to benefit from google maps without knowing the a lot of the details for example like we've had a few industry optimized map styles that you can just just adopt in your style and then you and you know we uh maintained um changes the improvements to these styles so that you can adopt for example travel map and you know let google improve the travel map for you over time without you having to do the heavy lift the heavy lift thing so um so so yeah yeah that's a great great addition on the industry map styles as well trying to you know as a team we're really trying to look at those verticals and just you know learn more about each nuance of what that industry or space might might be um learn from some of the implementations and try to you know take an opinionated approach at at least a starting point for for people in that vertical so yeah and and to add to that you know we really want to make it easy for folks to get up and running with our platform and so you know that was another focus was like you know if you just need to get out of the box uh set up a map for your use case um that was something we were really trying to to make easy for everyone as a starting place yeah for sure okay uh we'll move on to the next question uh this comes from harold i saw that better support for typescript and promises was finally added uh great that you noticed that harold um are you working on anything else like uh like this to make things easier for web developers so i can i can take this one uh since a group of us have been working really closely on this and developer relations and you know just to start we're definitely looking to always improve the developer experience i think we always try to take the approach of of making your lives easier in everything that we're doing like alicia just mentioned people that are starting a map for the first time we want to make that easy uh we want you know web development to be easy native development to be easy so i think one one example i'd like to point out is um some open source library work we're doing to support reactive uh programming patterns for rxjs for web um and also on the native side for native app development we're working on rx java uh kotlin flow and um combine as well uh so on the native side so rx rxjs for web just to answer your question directly but also uh on the native side rx java kotlin flow and combine or combine i should say and just just for note you can always keep keep an eye on our github presence for this uh repos are available on github.com google maps uh kind of shorten it a little bit so just google maps on on github uh and we we post on social when we have these available too so if you uh watch our twitter account on gmap's platform uh we you know we make mention of when anything's been added there but definitely keep an eye on google maps on github as well okay we'll move to the next question which is from anna are there any plans to expose the opengl context of the map on android similar to what you've done with webgl for the js api that we've announced uh travis did you want to take that sure thank you again anna for the question so i think that before i answer directly answer the android question i think we also we want to take the time to see how this webgl uh overlay work will evolve on the web like we've introduced this in open beta looking for your feedback so we can refine and get get that infrastructure to a place of general availability for javascript platform but along the same along those same lines the lessons that we learn in that journey will definitely influence any future plans around bringing more direct access to the opengl context on android or metal on ios forward um but like as we continue to think about uh think about having these same type of powerful experiences and capabilities across platform we really need to also make sure that there's a good uh ecosystem of graphics library support on android and on ios that developers can leverage so that they can more easily take advantage of the full power of of these of these overlays similar to the way we are partnering with 3js um to make it easier for developers to make these more impressive geospatial experiences we want to make sure that we um also try to uh to see the right type of relationships with other uh graphics libraries on android on ios so that um developers can do more with the power of not just maps but with these other libraries that are out there in the in the public space absolutely yeah i think it's key to that you mentioned that we're we're in public beta for this so we you know definitely want to hear from people as you use it go through the docs you know work on it within your own development environments and and i think you know hearing from you will help us you know influence a lot of what you're mentioning travis right yes definitely great okay um we'll move on to the next question uh wade's asking are there any plans to make a public road map available and i'd be remiss if i didn't make a maps joke here but uh we do make a public road map available in many types uh but is there any plans to make uh a public product i'm assuming it's a product roadmap available uh maybe alicia did you wanna try to take a stab at that and you don't have to follow it on with a bad maps joke either gonna say i think uh our consumer maps um are a great roadmap yeah um thank you wade for the question i'm assuming this is this is a roadmap for our product um so i mean one of the things that's really interesting about what we're announcing at i o is with webgl and some of the other things that we've been talking about is that it opens up a lot of possibilities and um in this process we're starting to you know think about a lot of different options and really trying to lean into getting customer feedback and input to help inform some of that roadmap so um again that's a plug for the public issue tracker uh you know give us your feedback you know we'd love to hear what you guys want to build and how things are going with webgl and some of the new things that we've done that's a long way of saying no we don't have a public road map available at the moment but we do want to you know get your get your feedback and have that help inform what we do next absolutely i i threatened to tell some bad maps jokes before this uh ama with some of my team so i think i've like i've slipped a little bit but i'll stop there i promise actually i don't promise uh okay uh let's go to the next question from luis uh how come tilt is limited to 67.5 degrees and sometimes less it seems like a pretty arbitrary limitation with that number um i think maybe travis did you want to did you want to try to address lisa's question yes thank you for for the for the question louise so uh you're all a special group so i think i'll give a little insight underneath the hood here so um the we've experimented a lot over the course of uh of our history as maps as a team on the the amount of data and information that we send uh to uh client uh client devices and those limitations that you're that you're speaking to louise those are informed by uh a lot of experimentation and analysis over years on what are the what are the the the proper constraints and those those those constraints those till constraints they vary with zoom level um just to make sure that we don't send too much data to your devices we have to we have to cover a wide a variety of device types and particularly with systems that are memory and resource constraint we want to make sure that we don't we don't potentially explode the amount of data that we allow by giving you more full tilt control all the way out to the horizon where potentially you can see a lot more data than you can from more of a top-down perspective that makes sense that makes sense um okay the 67.5 degree mystery has been solved uh all right let's go to uh kari not sure if it's carrie or kari i think kari i'm i'm glad the vector map is finally available so people are excited about that uh why uh why did it take so long as the question it's been used on on consumer our consumer maps maps.google.com on the web for years so it seems like this could have happened sooner um i will apologize travis to put you on the spot a second time but i'm thinking maybe you have the best answer for this oh it is fine um kyrie kerry thank you for the uh for the question and it's true we've we've on maps.google.com we have leveraged uh those webgl renderer for for quite some time when you when you think about when we actually first introduced the javascript maps api the world the landscape was very different back then and we designed an api around the central concept of having a top-down north up 2d map experience and a lot of our our client overlay apis just a lot of our api surface has these underlying assumptions baked into them and so as the consumer product evolved and built a full-out webgl renderer in the browser it took a while to to really go into the guts of the javascript maps api and really kind of refactor and redefine a lot of decisions that were made over the course of years and so we really um uh rolled up our sleeves i got under the hood of things and and cleared up the space so that we could make way to leverage this this uh this rendering library that the maps uh that maps.google.com has leveraged for a while and so now that we're here we're able to really provide that full power to you and uh and allow you to build experiences just as expressive if not even more expressive than what we can do on maps.google.com yeah and i would say you know for when i'm i'm excited about what people are going to build with this too genuinely excited i think it's uh you know we you are seeing one implementation of webgl with maps.google.com but just to imagine the you know plethora of different different ways that people are going to use the functionality with the tilt and rotate and just yeah lots of lots of really cool stuff i think that's going to happen um i really encourage you to uh take a look at our the blog post around the webgl offerings and it has links to demos created by partners at ubi lab so shout out to ubi labs yeah but it really like gives you it will give you a good sense as to the new classes of experiences that you that you can um you can build and i'm not going to spoil too many things because i want you to look at the demos but um if you see a raptor and velociraptor and one of them uh ping me all right you asked for it i'll say i'll say too if you if you can find a blimp flying around fireworks you can you can ping me uh find me on twitter uh okay so we have we have one more question um but i'm i'm gonna go for it i'm gonna i'm gonna tell a joke i'm telling maps joke uh in particular uh so i'm not even sure anyone's heard this one yet but um uh well i'll do a couple one what did the what did the place say to the reverse geocoder anyone is very good i have a question i'm hoping you can address or or address if i should say it right okay uh okay last one last one uh what did the street view say to the satellite view street view a little frustrated here you need to be more down to earth okay this is this is also where not having a group of people to groan also doesn't land very well but anyway i i couldn't help it um and if you go into our own metrodome you can maybe hear a few more of these jokes from some of the uh folks that are roaming around if you uh ask some questions or bump into them so make sure you go into io adventure and have some fun with with more good jokes i'm going to say they're good jokes they're not bad jokes it's never a bad joke okay uh maybe second last because it looks like we might have a live question to you so i'll be i'll be quick uh does the release of webgl overlay have any impact on deck.gl is the question from lucia and i will i will open the floor to whomever would like to take that question so i will take an initial stab at the at answering this thanks lucia for the for the question for those that are not familiar deck.gl is an open source uh library for 3d data visualization it's a webgl accelerated library currently if we go back to 2019 currently there is a use case where you can leverage deck geo for with our raster map we're just showcasing uh the state of is in this top down uh 2d north up base map perspective but we are definitely um in close uh talks with that developer community uh around um improving the synergies between uh the libraries i don't have anything directly to you to present here but it's likely that there's some things that we might be able to talk about towards the end of the year stay tuned for more okay and uh one more question i don't have a name unfortunately in this phone but um an anonymous question uh for the new cloud styling why is it that map id is set when the api loads and when the map loads and i think based on you taking the map id question earlier teams i'll pass it over to you yeah i can take this one um so i think uh from the warning of the question i think this means this is referring to um the javascript api uh integration with cloud-based map styling um initially it is true that we did require um specifying the map id and both in on the api load this refers to the you know the script tag that you need to include on your html page as well as including on your individual map object itself um so yeah initially due to some technical uh uh uh constraint at the time uh this was something that we started with and that allows us to um uh iterate quickly and get feedback from our partners and and obviously you know we we we heard you we heard our early uh customers right like that you know this is not intuitive and we really took bad feedback and and we uh completely agree with it and and for this launch for io we have addressed this uh um um sort of a limitation and uh and and removed the the the requirement for the map id on the api load completely so right now it is it is entirely optional to um uh for uh including including the map ids on api load is entirely optional yeah and i would say also go check out the docs because we did do some recent updates there to reflect that change um so hopefully it's it's explained well um in our documentation also yeah yeah that's actually a good chance also just if you're listening into this and you're wondering maybe you didn't hear much about cloud styling but you did webgl or vice versa um you know take a look i think probably the easiest way is to check out uh gmap's platform is our handle on twitter that points off to some of the blog posts that travis was mentioning and documentation developers cloud.google.com platform is the is a good starting point and you can go off to our developer site from there and also uh the feature tracker uh that that we were uh talking about earlier uh within our docs as well uh it's just a good chance to you know let us know how the open beta is going interact with us there uh let us know feedback uh and you know the teams that are on this call today take in all all the feedback that we receive from those channels um we definitely want to you know iterate as we've as we've made this available and uh and make it as good as it can be and like i said earlier just just try and make your your lives as developers a lot easier so um okay so i think we've run to the end of the questions and i promise not to tell any more bad maps jokes unless i mean unless that anyone wants me to i don't know i think you should mike yeah you got another one we got okay all right i i wasn't expecting that alicia uh okay last one i promise um i this is this is a not more less of a q a here but i once tried to settle an argument between two antipodes but they just couldn't seem to meet halfway all right there's a lot we i mean we could you know if people are interested we could just keep tweeting these out there's an endless supply of maps jokes on the google maps platform team but uh okay i think we will we will wrap it up at this point uh i want to thank alicia thames travis uh for joining me today uh these are great questions we we hope uh to really keep continue the conversation and this is a very formal way to receive and answer questions but uh love to hear from you across all the channels that we've mentioned today uh please reach out to me if you want as well uh happy to answer any questions you have on twitter i'm mpeg there and yeah just want to thank everybody and i hope you have a great rest of your i o you