How Can I Integrate Real-Time City Navigation Data into TouchDesigner?

General TouchDesigner Discussion
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I’m exploring how to integrate real-time city navigation data into my TouchDesigner projects and would appreciate any insights or guidance from the community. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding how to connect a city navigation tool with TouchDesigner to display and interact with real-time geographic data.

To give a bit of context, I’m using a navigation tool called “What city is this” This tool provides detailed information about a city based on geographic coordinates and offers real-time updates.you can find this tool on onlinecompass. net It’s quite useful for applications that need to show current city data on a map or dashboard. However, integrating such dynamic and location-based data into a TouchDesigner setup has been challenging.

My primary goal is to figure out how to effectively use the data from this navigation tool within TouchDesigner. Here are some specific areas where I need help:

  1. Data Integration: How can I fetch and incorporate real-time city data from the navigation tool into TouchDesigner? I’m looking for methods or techniques to pull in this data, whether through APIs or other data sources, and how to feed it into TouchDesigner’s node-based environment.
  2. Displaying Data: What are the best practices for visualizing dynamic geographic data in TouchDesigner? I’m interested in learning how to create visual representations of city data that update in real-time. For instance, displaying city landmarks, updating city maps, or showing live data feeds.
  3. Interactivity: Are there ways to make the data interactive within TouchDesigner? For example, can users interact with the city data, such as clicking on a location to get more details or seeing changes in the data as they move through different city areas?
  4. Performance Considerations: What should I be aware of in terms of performance when dealing with real-time data? Are there any tips for optimizing the performance of TouchDesigner when handling large datasets or frequent updates?
  5. Examples and Resources: If you have any examples or resources that demonstrate similar integrations, I would greatly appreciate it. Tutorials, documentation, or project examples related to integrating real-time data into TouchDesigner would be very helpful.

I’m eager to learn more about how others have approached this kind of integration and any creative solutions that have worked for you. Any guidance or suggestions on how to achieve a seamless integration of real-time city navigation data with TouchDesigner would be incredibly valuable. Thank you in advance for your assistance!

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Hi @ElsaSejad,

for data integration, try finding all the public APIs that allow for converting an IP address to geolocation. From this you could now go to openstreetmaps to extract for example a map tile of the location.

The most important operator to get you access to and communicate with web APIs would be the Web Client DAT.

For displaying data the way you describe perhaps is a fairly tall task - I would start again from where the data comes from and in what format it is available. Then you can again check how it might be loaded into TouchDesigner to be displayed.

TouchDesigner allows for interacting with 2D UI elements via panels or 3D data via Renderpicking. To display and update vast amounts of data, most likely a rendered view of the scene would be the right choice and any interactivity would be implemented via renderpicking.

Sorry, this is a rather short answer - again I mainly try to find datasources first and then see what I can do with them, or find ways to integrate those into TouchDesigner.

cheers
Markus