How about we overlay raster images to display more information.
RASTER MAP HOW TO
In the previous post Data Visualization with Maps, we had seen how to create maps with GeoJSON. How about we recreate the past by drawing maps with ‘Image tiles’? In order to truly appreciate what Vector tiles can do for us, we need to understand image tiles completely. Time traveling to the past and assessing network results would reveal images fetched at various zoom levels – The fact that we rounded off interactions to the nearest zoom level and fetched image tiles with railroad, street, country, place names was constrained and not good enough. Image tiles weren’t designed or capable to scale. Because you only need to download the blueprints, the amount of data needed to draw maps from vector tiles is drastically less than when downloading pre-rendered image tiles. You can think of them as the blueprints needed to draw a map, instead of static map images. Maps will download “vector tiles” that describe the underlying geometry of the map. Now, we use vector graphics to dynamically draw the map. It takes more than 360 billion tiles to cover the whole world at 20 zoom levels! Google Maps would download each tile as you needed it and then stitch sets together to form the map you see. Previously, Google Maps downloaded the map as sets of individual 256×256 pixel “image tiles.” Each pre-rendered image tile was downloaded with its own section of map imagery, roads, labels and other features baked right in. Today, Google Maps continues to be powered by the same tech they said is a game changer in 2010.
![raster map raster map](https://support.smartptt.com/hc/article_attachments/115001835649/12E.png)
They weren’t kidding! Google had rebuilt Maps with Vector graphics.
![raster map raster map](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/16733/51869261-0ae0b380-231e-11e9-9fd5-55ec4120a9fc.png)
On December 16, 2010, Google announced Google Maps 5.0 with a blog post titled ‘The next generation of mobile maps’.