Real-time maps for live events
Create unique experiences with your event data
By: Joe Gomez
With our tools for asset tracking and design, you can build interactive maps for events that incorporate real-time data. Show where people are and what they’re experiencing as it happens. Whether it’s a marathon, a stand-up paddle board competition, or a race across the desert, every event has unique data, and there’s a lot you can do so fans can engage wherever they are.
Red Bull Heavy Water
For the 2017 Red Bull Heavy Water Stand-Up Paddle Race, we built a custom event map showing real-time locations of athletes along the course, as well as dynamic event data like wave height and speed/heading of currents.
The event organizers partnered with SpoonDrift to drop ocean buoy’s along the course and track live conditions. We built this real-time data into the map and styled the map’s features based on the data.
For example, markers update with live positions of racers; you can see who deviates from the course. A color gradient shows wave height with directional arrows indicating both speed and heading of currents. Using Mapbox GL JS, our web API, we added interactivity so users can hover over the base map to get a reading of the conditions for that location.
If you missed the SUP race, watch a sped-up recap of the event on the map. Red Bull has incorporated live content from the race into the map replay so fans can watch video footage where it actually happened.
Grant Washburn, organizer of Red Bull Heavy Water told us what inspired this year’s live map:
Before the event map, people just checked how they finished online after the race and our content was recorded for post-event commentary. Every little piece of data you add helps insert viewers in the experience. First you have a map, then you start asking yourself, ‘Ok how many ways can you experience this map? How can you fly through it and view the course from different perspectives?’ The more I looked at Mapbox and played with it, I thought there’s so much potential.
Rebelle Rally
We recently partnered with the Rebelle Rally, a women’s endurance rally where competitors spend 8 days driving and navigating public dirt roads, double tracks, and sand dunes across Nevada and Southern California. Drivers rely exclusively on traditional tools like compasses, paper maps, and plotters.
Rebelle Rally’s map tells the story of each team day-by-day. We overlayed checkpoints and interactive pins on top of our Satellite Streets map style, which shows roads and real imagery of the terrain. For anyone who couldn’t make it out to the desert, this was a way to check in each day, note the progress of teams, and explore the obstacles ahead.
Mapbox opens up a world of opportunities for our event, fanbase, and community, not only from a rich content experience, but from a business perspective. We’re able to go far beyond “dots on a map” and make these places and experiences come to life.
- Emily Miller, Founder of Rebelle Rally
Iditarod
This playback of the Iditarod helps spectators track the sled teams venturing through white-out conditions, sub-zero temperatures, and gale-force winds; they cover more than 1,150 miles in 8–15 days.
Crowds gather to cheer the dog teams off from Willow, AK but quickly lose site of the action, relying on static list-views to “watch” the leader’s jostle for position. It’s difficult to comprehend the distance, terrain, checkpoints, and standings, so we created a birds-eye-view with an updating leaderboard on the left. Using run-time styling, the map’s style changes with the time of day.
Drop your fans right into the dessert, ocean, tundra, or any action-packed arena with our developer toolset for live, updating maps. Get started with our tutorials for web apps, grab a Commercial subscription for tracking up to 1,000 assets, or contact our team for licenses that scale for however many athletes you’re tracking.
