MercatorGL

MercatorGL is a minimal library for calculating web mercator projections on a GPU using WebGL. It provides utilities to inject GLSL code for projecting longitude/latitude coordinates into already exisiting vertex shader code and calculate the uniforms it requires. MercatorGL focuses on numerical stability by performing most calculations at 64-bit precision, and switching to an "offset mode" at higher zoom levels (using a technique borrowed from deck.gl).

Following Mapbox conventions input coordinates are transformed to a 512x512 Mercator space, with (0, 0) at the top-left and (512, 512) at the bottom-right. Z-coordinates, if provided, are interpreted as meter elevations. The application must provide a projection matrix (via updateMercatorUniforms) to map from Mercator space into clip space.

An example of usage with MapboxGL is shown below.

    let map = new mapboxgl.Map({
        container: mapboxContainer,
        style: "mapbox://styles/mapbox/streets-v9",
        center: [-73.982130, 40.762896],
        zoom: 15
    });
 
    // NOTE: MercatorGL works with both GLSL 1 and 3 shaders
    let vs = `
        #version 300 es
        layout(location=0) in vec2 lngLatPosition;
        void main() {
            // mercator_gl_lngLatToClip function injected by injectMercatorGLSL().
            // mercator_gl_lngLatToMercator and mercator_gl_mercatorToClip also available to do
            // projection in multiple steps.
            gl_Position = mercator_gl_lngLatToClip(position);
        }
    `;
 
    let fs = `
        #version 300 es
        precision highp float;
        uniform vec4 color;
        out vec4 fragColor;
        void main() {
            fragColor = color;
        }
    `;
 
 
    // Insert projection functions into vertex shader
    let vertexShaderSource = injectMercatorGLSL(vs);
    let fragmentShaderSource =  fs;
    // Create WebGL program from vertexShaderSource and fragmentShaderSource
 
    let uniforms = {
        // An application uniform, not used by MercatorGL
        color: new Float32Array(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
    };
 
    // Uniforms used by MercatorGL are added to the map.
    allocateMercatorUniforms(uniforms);
 
    map.on("render", (e) => {
        let center = map.getCenter().toArray();
        let zoom = map.getZoom();
 
        // Update the values of MercatorGL uniforms in the map (including projection matrix provided by Mapbox).
        // The application must use the map to update program uniforms used by MercatorGL.
        updateMercatorUniforms(uniforms, center, zoom, map.transform.projMatrix);
 
        // Draw to canvas
    });