By: Bersabel Tadesse
Zenly, the real-time location sharing app for friends, recently released their new Footsteps feature, built with our fast-rendering vector maps. When you open it, you see a colorful fog over the map. As you walk around the real world with Zenly in your pocket, the fog dissolves around you on the map, just like the player maps we’ve seen in Warcraft and similar games.
Continue using the app and you can see your daily routine play out on the map, just like it does on Zenly’s main map. You’ll see 3D icons floating above the locations you visit most often, like your home or office.
We built some special components and combined them with a variety of technology we were already using to create Footsteps. The result is a product, map, and visualization our users have never seen before. Footsteps is a carefully crafted, real-time mapping technology underpinned by data science algorithms that deliver a personalized user experience.
— Laurent Cerveau, CTO Zenly.
Zenly’s location tech works in real time to uncover the map as you cover more ground. Zenly’s location tracking runs in the background, updating automatically as you check out new neighborhoods and take road trips. The more you explore, the higher you rank, letting you compete with your friends for a spot on the leaderboard.
Check out Zenly in the app store or log into Mapbox Studio to build your own visualizations!
Clear the fog with Zenly was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.