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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Related mapbox-gl-shadow-simulator source code: https://github.com/ted-piotrowski/mapbox-gl-shadow-simulator
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.
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)
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.
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)
"Every" seems to be a bit of a stretch trees part. It's got maybe 5% of the tree shadows near me.
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)
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 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 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...
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 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.
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.
Related product: https://shadowmap.org/
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
First time I've seen my workplace as the default centre for a map like this. Someone from the Technische Fakultät did this?
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.
Looks useful for photography. You can see where the light and shadow areas will be and plan out where and when to go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??)
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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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".
Viewing Boulder, CO at 8PM is fun to see how the mountains really blot out the sun.
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!
Relatedly, I use this website to visualize what angle the sun is coming from: https://www.suncalc.org/
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... :(
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Nice! If you park on the street, you can use this to figure out where to park to keep your car cooler during summer.
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.
Definitely not right for my 30 acres. Doesn’t take into account that more than half is covered by trees.
Nice projet ! I didn’t know such a tool existed. Will definitely use it when changing home !
Very helpful to figure out what seats in a stadium would be best to avoid the afternoon sun.
Checked it on my neighborhood in Warsaw and wow - it seems to work well
Seeing shadows on opposing sides of similar buildings in the same area as me.
Checked my specific area.
Has shadow from a tree that fell over and was removed 6 months ago.
Weirdly, it's got ~1/4 of the buildings in my downtown area.
The map near my house is so wrong as to be almost unrecognizable.
Has the trees on my property pretty spot on. Kind of creepy.
Stuff like this reminds me how awesome people can be
impressive, wonderful gem of software, super useful for companies that install solar cells. congratulations, it is a very good job.
Half the trees in my neighborhood are missing.
Such a useful tool for photographers! Thanks!
The Eiffel tower's is fun (:
Excellent. Now an app giving directions that maximize walking in the shade, or the sun, can easily be built.
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.
this is amazing
[dead]
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