Tessera Viz
PX-02
Surface 04
Geography, without a second mapping stack.
Web Mercator, raster and vector basemaps, clustering by zoom, tracked movement and edge bundling — with the same nodes, links and styling as the graph view.
What it does.
Projection
Web Mercator, the projection every tile server uses, so our coordinates and your tiles agree.
Raster basemaps
Any z/x/y tile server, with subdomain rotation, signed URLs, custom headers — and an offline tile pack you ship with the application.
Vector basemaps
Our own vector tile decoder and renderer. We wrote the protobuf reader, the tile decoder and the canvas renderer, so a vector basemap adds no dependency. Tiles restyle without refetching, so dark mode is a token change rather than a new request, and they stay sharp at any zoom.
Clustering by zoom
Points collapse into counts as you zoom out, so a dense city is one marker labelled 4,182 rather than 4,182 overlapping markers.
Movement
Tracked entities with interpolated positions between samples and trails behind them. Interpolation is strictly between known samples: on a map, an extrapolated position is a false claim about where something was.
Flows
Weighted links between places, width by volume, with edge bundling that groups parallel routes into visible corridors. Bundling runs in projected world space, so it stays correct at every zoom instead of re-bundling on each pan.
Unplaced data
Entities with no coordinates go into a side panel rather than at zero-zero in the Atlantic. A missing location is a fact about the data, and it should look like one.
Maps that work with no internet.
An offline tile pack
A bundle of tiles keyed by z/x/y that you ship with the application. Point the basemap at it and the map draws from disk.
Unusually small, for vector
Vector tiles are a fraction of raster size, and one pack serves every theme.
Why most vendors cannot do this
Because their renderer phones home. Ours has nothing to phone.
Limits — published, not buried.
No labels on vector basemaps yet
Our vector renderer draws geometry and styles it; it does not yet place place-names. Raster basemaps have labels baked in. Label placement needs text shaping and a collision solver, and it is on the roadmap.
No 3D terrain, no globe
Flat Mercator only.
Not a GIS
No topology editing, no spatial joins, no geoprocessing. Visualization and interaction.