Short Announcement: kepler.gl is available now – free and open

Back in 2016 Uber surpised the geo market with its solution “deck.gl“, a “predecessor” of kepler.gl:

WebGL2 powered geospatial visualization layers

The visuals were quite stunning:
You can find some more information about deck.gl 4.0 at the Uber blog. Kepler.gl is build on top of this Uber framework:

a data-agnostic, high-performance web-based application for visual exploration of large-scale geolocation data sets. Built on top of deck.gl, [it] can render millions of points representing thousands of trips and perform spatial aggregations on the fly.

Kepler.GL

Kepler.gl is a nodeJS application and can be downloaded from github. The code is licensed under the MIT license. The solution will need a MapBOX API key to work according to the documentation. This key is provided with a Mapbox subscription (also with the “Free to start” plan). After 1h I stopped trying to install this. The installation requires nodeJS, yarn and “project dependencies” which are not described in detail. As said: I was not able to install:

Yet the examples look quite promising: And yes, this is 3D baby!:

This platform definetly addresses the user crowd of Mapbox. It is therefore an interesting tool for data wizards. I am looking forward to see some examples in the digi-media sections of large news corporations in the next months. Have you already worked with kepler or deck? What was your impression? Drop us a line in the comments below.