How the heck did it automatically pan the map to my current location, my small town, in an Incognito window, on page load?
Is IP geolocation this accurate and accessible to every website nowadays?
If this website can do this I assume every website I visit can do it too?
This site is great but it's only an approximation.
We've used this website for years for checking the sun in various potential homes and holiday rentals. It's a half decent approximation but it doesn't really have proper height data (I think it's using standard building classification from Open Street Map data?) so it's only a guide.
Plus it seems to be missing a boat load of trees in the streets.
But it's pretty cool overall! And I'll keep it in mind as we're in the process of looking for a new home.
Did you try the paid data? The free one missed most the trees, but the $2 map showed all the trees in my nearby park. Really impressive.
So - how do I know if the paid version is accurate if the free version is inaccurate? It shows me a sample of some place I don't know so it's impossible to evaluate.
They should offer some other way to trial the full version.
Edit: looks like they already show side-by-side samples, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40535186.
They could probably have a side-by-side comparison of somewhere famous like Central Park (I'm from UK, fwiw) showing the free vs paid data to give an idea of what one might get; I guess it varies by location how much detail is mapped though, and how recently.
The ‘try a sample’ link in the upgrade flow drops you into Central Park West with the full data.
$2 is how.
The sample convinced me. $2 is a really small investment.
Nice! Last time I found something like this was a 15$/mo yearly subscription, which was clearly targeted at real state agents, and didn't make any sense for a one time check... Luckily they just believed the system clock, so at least I could check over the year by changing the computer time
A few months ago I paired for the tree data to figure out the best place on our property to place some planter beds.
I’m very happy with the results. It confirmed my guess that a specific section gets more light over the year even though there is a bit more shade in the mornings until late spring.
I’m surprised; I was thinking they might buy a few satellite photos through a sunny day and just… look at where the shadows are (with code).
Maybe working back from that could feedback how high the buildings might be.
They seem to have proper shadow information. I live in a semi-rural village and shadows from trees along our street are quite accurate ( and seem to be based on one section before it was cleared a year ago or so)
The trees thing seems to be new, I’m not sure I’ve noticed that before
Funnily enough... it's completely missing the vacation rental mini chalet my neighbors built which casts shade over most of my backyard. I suppose this means it won't be missed on any surveys if it mysteriously gets knocked down.
What's the data source?
The premium map is really good for my neighborhood!
I wonder if it's image processing from Planet data or something. Shape from shadows (then back to shadows?)
It definitely has no data about roof shapes.
The Nazca lines in Peru seem to align with the shadows of the mountain, I made two videos to demonstrate it: https://x.com/janBuild/status/1796472554905022785
In the second video, you can see that the shadow seems to align with a curved line during summer solstice: https://x.com/janBuild/status/1796473232658518133
Not sure I see it? Maybe would help to have someone highlight specific lines/shadows. I can maybe see it if I let my brain see some alignment and ignore the mostly not-aligned bits.
Hmm yeah these particular shadows don't look that well aligned to me, but the hypothesis certainly warrants more searching
You should definitely make the video more visual and add some helper lines. I watched the video 20+ times and still don't think they align (of course it's an approximation but still).
Interesting! The area is at the tropics so there's not much shadows for the majority of the day. And it seems as if its only very early in the morning where these shadows occur. A small change in time and the shadow changes greatly. Equally a very small variation in elevation of the mountain and plain may give different results.
Wow, is this a novel theory? That is the first time I’ve heard of it.
Interesting. Could they have used the shadows as for of ruler to keep things straight?
Wow! This is an awesome observation
Wow. Did you just crack the mystery?!
Hmmm... I'm not an astronomer, and I wondered if they might have once been more-exact. It seems that while Earth's orbit has long term variations (eccentricity, obliquity, precession) the shortest of those cycles is still quite a lot longer than the estimated age of the Nazca lines. (Precession with a 26ky cycle, Nazca lines at 1.5 to 2.5ky.)
the shadow of the smaller and smaller peaks seems to also touch/trace thinner and thinner lines, these lines seem very different compared to the actual animal depictions in other Nazca lines. Could these lines be explained by diffrent rates of photosynthesis / occasional vegetation debsity variations selectively protecting the soil from erosion?
One nature demarcates curves, humans and animals will adapt to them in their choice of path.
One thing I often wonder is do car crashes happen more frequently when the sun is low in the sky and facing traffic? Surely someone has got together the data on traffic accidents, maps, times and a model of the earth/sun to work this out!
(Google search results for this are full of spam from a mix of motor insurance companies and sunglass companies)
As a young driver I was given the advice that if you see a lot of oncoming cars using their sunshade or squinting into the sun as they come towards you, it's time to pull over and wait it out.
Driving with the sun at your back is never a good time to be on the road.
Crossing the road as a pedestrian neither.
There is a section of I-70 in Colorado that experiences temporary closures due to severe sun glare at certain times of the day and year. https://www.codot.gov/travel/sunglare
I was on a bike stopped at a stoplight and was rear-ended by a car for this very reason.
Perplexity thinks yes. https://www.perplexity.ai/page/Do-Car-Crashes-kmZIsMnbR4qcdx...
I just had to check some really rural places and went to some random village in tibet. As there is no information about trees or buildings there, just roads, it surprisingly doesn't work - it just shows some shadows based on terrain heights in middle of empty village road grid.
So as expected, if the site has height information it can draw shadows but definitely not for "every building" etc that the title claims.
well... of course?
Some people still thinks words should mean what they mean.
The irony that I've written a typo in a comment about words is not lost on me.
I personally thought the interesting part of the submission was the "every" of the title, ie there might have been some AI algo that could have somehow approximated height and shadows based on multiple satellite images or use some data that is not available for everyone (hence the "every" could have applied)
Currently it's an approximation of shadows based on unreliable open data which is nice but not that special.
They shouldn't be using "every". It sounds like the kind of thing American programmers say.
A tall tree on my street was lost last year: it shows the shadow for it even though it’s not on the satellite image. Now I wonder where it gets the tree data from.
It says it is using openstreetmap, so you can probably edit that tree if its added to OSM.
After reading this I went through all the OSM datasets I could see (including double-checking the layers) and none of them showed the tree. Now I’m even more curious.
It's coming from public LIDAR data, which captures both trees and the ground below them (and is able to tell which is which).
Can you point to which LIDAR dataset? I did not see any openstreetmap datasets with the tree present.
First, I went and looked at my house... It's got a lot of tall oak trees near by and in a park across the street.
It shows it almost completely in daylight save for building shadows, which is really wrong even right now as most of the house is shaded by trees.
Then I see an upgrade button... and it wants me to pay. Yet I can't even validate the data passes a sniff test. Their free tier very much doesn't.
Yea the shadow data for my area is hilariously wrong. It’s missing a whole forest that shades my house and a road nearby.
Mine still has a forest next door that was cut down 8-9 yrs ago.
I feel like the paid version is actually a bit better for trees
It may be, but without a way to see that, why would I ever consider paying?
First time I've seen my workplace as the default centre for a map like this. Someone from the Technische Fakultät did this?
It's not a default center it's just your IP address and will change for everyone.
It's location based. The default place on the map for me was the Airbnb I'm staying at right now
When it doesn't have height data it seems to set every building to the same height. Interesting, but it does make it inaccurate in my country.
OpenStreetMaps is pretty coarse with building heights. Seemingly just an integer with most buildings being 1 (stories?) from what I’ve seen.
I don't have this data at hand, and often it's hard to see from out front or differs for different parts of the building. So while an avid OpenStreetMap contributor, I rarely add height info to buildings
Perhaps I should look into high resolution height data (that is, high enough that an individual building shows up at all) with licenses that allow use in OSM and at least tag the buildings that show having a mostly uniform height. For example in the Netherlands, AHN is amazing (hundreds of points per tree! It looks like a 3d wireframe render of the entire country, truly amazing) but the license is not permissive enough.
Is it accurate though?. If I fix the time and slide by the month, I expect the shadow to move east to west, but it only grows or shortens, which would mean the sun is exactly at the same vertical line on ground every day of the year but the height above horizon changes.
It shouldn't be on a vertical line, it should follow the solar analemma for your location. It's essentially trivial to add this, I think the creator just needs to add equation of time correction?
It fun to do that (lock the time, slide by day) and see what happens on DST change.
This is pretty cool. I bet you could sell something like this to real estate people. It's useful to see what kind of shade a place gets in, say, January.
It would have more potential for sellers of solar panels... if it had the shape of roofs right (which it doesn't as I look to my house).
Sure, that'd be good too, but even for real estate... it'd be good for someplace that's colder and darker in the winter to get an idea of what things are like.
For instance this fancy neighborhood on the hill has expensive housing, but in January it's already getting pretty dark quite early:
https://shademap.app/@44.07882,-121.32535,13.88804z,17041517...
I thought there was a problem with some calculation that only occurred in early March and November (which can be observed by dragging the calendar slider.)
Then I realized the "problem" was the Daylight Saving Time changes... existential sigh
(Where do I submit a pull request to address that obvious bug??)
The bug is that the time displayed should be the local time of the area, an in particular the correct date for the DST change.
So the jump in shadows due to DST change in March should not be on the same day in Paris than in New-York.
Related product: https://shadowmap.org/
I've signed up for shadow map while house hunting and it was worth every cent.
Shade map just crashes my phone every time.
This is so useful when buying a house in the country that sun is as valuable as gold and you want to maximise it in the backyard. Great tool.
You especially want to maximise the sun to light your solar panels.
This doesn't seem to have ANY of the trees in my neighborhood (in Massachusetts) even though there are just tons of very large ones.
Also, apparently no trees cast a shadow at noon?
If anyone builds a version of this that accepts crowd sourced phone images to increase the accuracy with photogrammetry (before I get around to it) I will give you shademaps.com.
Could also source this from images uploaded to Google etc?
First off, this is cool and well done. I did notice an oddity, but the fact that we're all complaining about oddities and edge cases (pardon the pun) shows how well done it is. In any case, the wonky thing I noticed is that it effectively shows shadows on the edges of forests, but not on the forests themselves (at least in my area).
I had the same issue.
Very nice. I was considering installing a few PV panels and was looking for something like this to estimate the solar exposure in various time periods. Works nicely to get an initial idea.
I guess this calculator [1] and tools such as [2] and [3] might help you, as well.
[1]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html
Excellent. Now an app giving directions that maximize walking in the shade, or the sun, can easily be built.
Google maps in the browser on desktop had a similar feature when you zoomed in enough to see building footprints. It showed shadows for current time of day, based on building height and -footprint.
I used it all the time, in the summers of 2014/2015 to pick places to have lunch at, that were in the sun, when I had a corporate job in the center of Berlin.
It stopped working/being displayed at some time, don't remember which year after it was.
I guess not many people knew about it and the discontinuation of it can be booked under "general enshittification of Google products".
Nice projet ! I didn’t know such a tool existed. Will definitely use it when changing home !
Related mapbox-gl-shadow-simulator source code: https://github.com/ted-piotrowski/mapbox-gl-shadow-simulator
Here it is not showing any shadows in Honolulu mid-May around noon: https://shademap.app/@21.30371,-157.85237,16.56781z,17168489...
Which is how it should be[1]; cool!
I've used it a couple times to show how the new luxury towers they're building in my neighborhood block the sun to the older/cheaper low-rise homes... :(
Such a useful tool for photographers! Thanks!
If you are a photographer, I can recommend Sun Seeker on iOS. It integrates with compass (so you can see, e.g., where the sun will rise/set in real time), but also has this map mode showing sun position relative to terrain, angle relative to horizon, etc., at a given time of any day. Though it doesn’t try to paint shadows (which I think would be error-prone anyway for most locations), it is a one-time purchase that costs comparatively little and does not try to upsell a premium version.
Does anyone know if the shadow of the Washington Monument actually reaches the Potomac River in the morning? [1] That'd be cool to see, but seems like the sun would never be bright enough at 6:30 AM.
[1] https://shademap.app/@38.88916,-77.03523,14.41656z,171715125...
Nice project, but I wouldn't claim 3m precision, at least not around steep terrain. I checked if I can use it for climbing areas, and a spot around here that goes in the shade around 1pm this time of year is still shown in full sun around 3-4pm.
Thank you so much for doing this. Sublime and moving in a way only things that are novel and required a ton of effort can be. Visualizing over time and seeing this gave me an interpretation of sunrise as removing shadows, and sunset adding them, gave me goosebumps.
At zoom levels where buildings aren't loaded, they're treated as casting no shadow, which causes the site to hugely underestimate the amount of shade for dense urban areas. I can see how this would be a hard problem if you're doing the shadow rendering on the client side, but is it something that you have thought about trying to solve?
According to this, a significant area around the front of my house is quite shaded. In reality, it's in full sun. It also doesn't show my backyard being mostly shaded.
Has the trees on my property pretty spot on. Kind of creepy.
I'm impressed! I live on a forested ridge above a horseshoe bend in a big lake and there's a fairly steep hill behind our home. Our home is surrounded by big oak trees but there is a big front yard that's all lawn, and behind us there is a lot of open space where we have a pretty big garden and a pretty steep hill below that is forest with big hardwood trees. It pretty much nails down when and where it's shady.
"Worldwide trees" is just marketing. I just checked and it has no trees where i live.
It does have the buildings although if i look out the window their shadows are a tiny bit too short for my location.
A similar app that I found recently (as they were nominated for an Apple Design Award) that does this is Sunlitt [0].
Very polished and generally well designed.
Relatedly, I use this website to visualize what angle the sun is coming from: https://www.suncalc.org/
I’ve been watching shadows for the last 90 minutes and I have to says this tool isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good.
Half the trees in my neighborhood are missing.
My and my neighbours properties are not correctly rendered here... that's almost certainly due to my being in South Africa and the data not being that rich in my area - still a very cool tool though!
this is amazing
Checked it on my neighborhood in Warsaw and wow - it seems to work well
Is there a tool that could convert OSM map into a perspective view from a given location? And show what peaks and notable buildings are visible?
Doesnt work for the map around my home. While the buildings in my neighborhood generate shadows on the map, none of the trees do.
I love this, although I do wonder how accurate it is, given the likely limited underlying elevation data source. It reminds me a lot of an application for creating shadow animations based on digital elevation models that I wrote some time back https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbw-user-manual/book/tool...
I'm sorry, but for 18:00 Dvořáková street in Brno, Czechia, it is very inaccurate. It shows half of the street without shadow - but I know empirically the whole street is in shadow. Great idea and awesome implementation (fast and instantly responsive!), but sadly useless.
Is this using my browser's location to center the map? Because the starting place was close to my house, so I assume that is the case.
This doesn't seem to be taking trees into account. My neighborhood is filled with douglas firs that are 200+ feet tall and cast a lot of shade.
The buildings boxes are a bit misleading, at least of the places I checked. It would be nice to have some sort of visulaisation of the height data that they use.
I really like the Annual Sunlight and hours in the sun layers. It's really nice to be able to instantly see the shading at different times of the year without having to awkwardly select a date.
Nice! If you park on the street, you can use this to figure out where to park to keep your car cooler during summer.
impressive, wonderful gem of software, super useful for companies that install solar cells. congratulations, it is a very good job.
The map near my house is so wrong as to be almost unrecognizable.
How are you handling shading for dense wooded areas? I'm looking around at some neighborhoods with dense redwood trees in the northern California region. I know in the middle of the day a decent amount of shadow will still be in the area, which comes from the density of the forest and the length of the trees. From what I'm seeing, this shading is not accurate to the wooded areas I frequent.
But, that's probably a really hard problem to tackle. If there's no data on tree height, it seems impossible to accurately portray shadow extrapolations for forests. Especially since the forests can have a high frequency of change.
Super cool project, I hope this continues to grow!
It'd be more useful if they explained why some of the data is so inaccurate, so you could decide what to trust and what not to. In my neighborhood I found some houses not casting shadows, or partial shadows, lot of missing trees, and houses casting shadows onto themselves in ways they can't.
As others have done, I first looked for my house. I noticed something I hadn't noticed ever, namely a spot in the neighborhood that is shaded for most of the day. A good trick to know when summer comes and you want to keep your car cool.
Very helpful to figure out what seats in a stadium would be best to avoid the afternoon sun.
Definitely not right for my 30 acres. Doesn’t take into account that more than half is covered by trees.
I'd like to see outdoor park / landscape designers actually think of shade issues when thinking of shade umbrellas, shade roof overheads, etc.
I used to work outdoors somewhere where the "shade" providing roof and umbrellas were useless many hours of the day, due to the actual position of the sun.
"Every" seems to be a bit of a stretch trees part. It's got maybe 5% of the tree shadows near me.
Super cool! But it seems to think that very small elevation changes are like mountains. The couple small hills in my local park don't cast a shadow haha.
Related:
Using Lidar to map tree shadows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658001 - July 2023 (41 comments)
Shade Map Pro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30532286 - March 2022 (12 comments)
Show HN: 3D map of shade around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29827943 - Jan 2022 (71 comments)
Map of shadows at any place and time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681693 - Dec 2021 (4 comments)
Show HN: GPX replay map that shows terrain shadows during activities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28854959 - Oct 2021 (14 comments)
I don't know how the mechanics of it would work, but some kind of local accuracy index would be very useful in such broad maps.
Because the elephant in the room with most global dataset compilations is that the accuracy varies greatly from place to place. Some countries or regions have detailed data, others have generic or unclassified blobs. Some data is older, some is newer.
An ideal tool reduces the need for detailed provenance checking upon every usage.
I love the idea, but sadly it's not very precise in our case. There are even buildings on the property that - as far as I know - never existed in that place.
Very cool. I looked at the Bay Bridge and it gets the towers but probably not the bridge itself (this is a trivial point except for folks right by the bridge, but fun to look for edge cases).
I’ve wanted to build an app that could estimate total solar energy generation for boondocking RVers (meaning the position changes a lot), and if what others are saying about the paid version is correct, this seems like an intriguing way to improve solar energy generation estimates.
You might consider making a tool for wireless internet service providers and mapping Crown Castle / other roof antenna space services. This would be really helpful in determining uplink reach (just may need some parameters on roof-top blocking structures)
Seeing shadows on opposing sides of similar buildings in the same area as me.
Its got far more buildings on this map than Open Street Map. Where are they getting the data from, and can it be added to Open Street Map?
Looks useful for photography. You can see where the light and shadow areas will be and plan out where and when to go.
I made an application like this waaaaay back in grad school. The hardest part is that it looks believable but getting accurate data is just so difficult.
And behold, it’s missing the entire forest my street is in.
This looks fantastic - well done for putting so much effort in to creating it. Literally a few days ago I was looking for something exactly like it, so that I could work out the likely amount of solar panels I'd require when factoring in seasonal shadows cost.
I imagine the solar industry to be a target market of yours and wish you lots of luck with growing it.
I love this - I was looking for something exactly like it yesterday and you've built it. Specifically, I was looking to factor in shading to work out the likely amount of solar panels I'd need for both electricity and solar hot water across the seasons. Nice - great work!
Checked my specific area.
Has shadow from a tree that fell over and was removed 6 months ago.
Stuff like this reminds me how awesome people can be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HnOJirSCn8
Due to the initial location, an extra verse can now be added to this song. (About a little Café in Sneek that is somehow tenuously linked to pretty much everything)
Wow, I had such an idea years ago when walking under blazing sun following gps directions, I wished that it would plan the route according to shade.
Viewing Boulder, CO at 8PM is fun to see how the mountains really blot out the sun.
Weirdly, it's got ~1/4 of the buildings in my downtown area.
A cool use of this is to visually identify clusters of tall buildings, usually business districts and the distance and relationship to the other clusters and the areas in between. Set it around 7AM and an appropiate zoom and start thinking of business ideas.
It is very cheap and easy. Even the free versions of the database available from maxmind are plenty accurate for town level.
At my last job, I built a little docker image that used the free maxmind DB and kept it up to date, and ran a node server which returned some JSON telling estimated lat/long, city name, country, etc.
Cheap, easy, and wrong. It puts me a clear 800km away from where I'm actually sitting, and I'm sitting in a major UK city.
It's put me on the wrong continent before now. That was fun.
Where do we locate you? https://ipinfo.io/
If the location data is incorrect, you can always submit a correction with us: https://ipinfo.io/corrections
Better! Still 200km out, but better!
200 KM means there is room for improvement. If you reach out to support and provide a correction, that will be quite helpful. If you mention that you came from HN, I can report back on why we had such a deviation.
Mine was about 600 km wrong but the correct country at least. It's reporting the ISP's location but it's a country wide ISP.
If you reach out to support and drop a correction with us, that will be quite helpful. This is an unusually high deviation, so we would like to investigate it.
I guess the accuracy really depends on your location or ISP.
I believe my ISP rarely or never rotates IP addresses, and on top of that I think my ISP provided router is assigned an IPv6 address and it prioritizes using it, because when I visit whatismyipaddress.com with JS disabled, it can only show my IPv6 address, but if I enable JS it can show an IPv4 address too (I assume through the WebRTC IP leak method, which requires JS)
When I built the thing I mentioned, and even if i did so now, I'd just not make an AAAA record for it, because it's still safe to assume ipv4 connectivity exists (and not just via some remote proxy or something), and I think at least the database I had access to was for ipv4.
I don't think they need any hackery to get your IPv4, they just need a separate hostname configured that they can fetch from, which only has an ipv4 (A) record.
Cheap, easy, and generally correct for the majority of people*
Just because it’s 800km off for your IP does not mean it’s 800km off for every IP and Maxmind is generally considered one of the reliable providers of this information.
What did you expect after leaving Europe? /s
You should probably try what one of the few online demos of IP geolocation tell about your IP... (just to cite one among many, quality varies a lot across services and geographic zones: https://www.maxmind.com/en/locate-my-ip-address)
Interesting. I have a static IP, and have kept that same IP through multiple moves around the state, but it knows my current zip code. I wonder if that is because my ISP shares the zip code, or through association with data collected from other sites.
And yet every site that uses IP geolocation for useful purposes thinks I'm in a completely different state that bounces around every few months, if I don't let the browser share my location.
I work for IPinfo.io (feel free to check your location data with us to see if we are correct as well). It is most likely that your ISP is sharing your zip code via a WHOIS/geofeed record.
For me, Firefox and without iCloud Private Relay engaged, Maxmind is within about 2km and doesn't get the city correct (but we're right on a border), and IPinfo is about 15km as the crow flies (and gets the city entirely wrong).
That is very unfortunate. If you reach out to support and drop a correction with us, that will be quite helpful.
This makes me glad I have iCloud Private Relay turned on for all of my devices and my wife’s devices. Clicking on this link showed my location as Birmingham, Alabama, more than 1000 miles away from my actual location in northern Iowa. Several of the other IP geolocation sites others have linked in this thread showed places like Chicago (closer), and Dallas (much further).
Well, the jokes on you: Now we all know that you're in northern Iowa.
obviously, that's yet another layer of misdirection. They're probably in Nebraska, laughing at all of us.
Geo-IP through Cloudflare:
See https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/ip-geolocation/.Mine's off by more than 100 miles (Comcast Business fiber), it's not magic.
Cloudflare only gives you the country
No. https://developers.cloudflare.com/rules/transform/managed-tr...
Then how did the website end up just about a mile from my house?
It's probably either just the lat long of the PoP or some magic based connection latency?
I thought the same. It's the first time I've ever seen IP geolocation get my home IP address correct. It usually thinks I'm in North Carolina (I'm in Florida).
Mine started in a different city about 520km away. And I wasn't incognito. Probably a lot more to do with your country, your ISP or coincidence than anything else.