Designs for displaying flight tracks on campaign pages

[heidimok]

Context

EPIC: Visualize aircraft flight path for 3 Campaigns in CASEI #576

Through the discovery process for this feature, early design ideas were drawn out. This issue documents the early process and aims to get to a final design for implementation of 3-5 Campaigns.

Exploration Process

Where should flight maps appear in CASEI?

A few options were considered for where on the CASEI website a flight path could exist.	Opt 1: Campaign page (Selected Direction)	Opt 2: Platform page	Opt 3: New page
We would display flight paths for all aircrafts associated with a campaign deployment in CASEI	We would display flight paths for all aircraft platforms on the actual platform page.	We would create a new search filter across campaigns and platforms where scientists can click on flight paths on a map to find campaigns.
We can go beyond showing the “study region” via a bounding box of all the flight paths in that frame for a campaign and instead show the actual flight path on this page.	This is an example of flight paths of the same platform deployed multiple times. Each individual flight track is shown in a different color.	This is a screenshot of the AOI search suggesting how a new page can focus just on this kind of view with flight tracks instead of boxes.
Pro: Focus on the science objective and context	Pro: Since you would visualize the same platform you could more easily spot flight patterns over time.	Pro: System wide approach
Con: A campaign can have many deployments with different aircrafts so the visual needs to accommodate	Con: You can't get the science context just from the platform page.	Con: Given there are so many paths that overlap, the user experience may not be as good as the idea seems (there could be work arounds that are filter-driven).

Through discussion between Heidi and Stephanie, we will be going with option 1 to focus on adding visual to the campaign page because that's the main page that focuses on the science objective.

What are some ways of visualizing flight paths on a CASEI campaign page?

Concept of changing the timeline to an elevation timeline. Perhaps when the user scrubs the line they can see the place move along a track	Concept of highlighting paths on a map whenever a user hovers over the timeline deployment	Concept of showing separate maps per platform since each Campaign deployment can have multiple flights

Further inspiration

Ideas shared by other designers on the team to be inspired by in future iterations

• https://www.aclima.io/
• https://anydistance.exposure.co/
• https://kepler.gl/demo/world_flights
• https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index?start=2023-06-24T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&end=2023-09-24T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&latitude=19&longitude=26&zoom=1.5

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] Flight map mocks ups based on the real data for at least 3 Campaigns
• [ ] Design documentation & rationale

[heidimok]

Update Oct 16, 2023 - Inspiration

• I'm just posting some inspiration I was into
• I'm thinking we can discuss dark vs. light basemap and choose a high contrast color for the flight path.
• I would also opt for less color variation in the tracks/lines to keep the overall visualization simple because the goal isn't to try and look for platform clusters, but rather help scientists see where a flight has travelled in context of a campaign they are already exploring.

[heidimok]

Update Nov 3, 2023

Sharing the latest mockup iteration, which plop in Wille's initial felt map prototypes for campaign OLYMPEX (ER2 and DC8)

The idea here is that we reduce some redundancy of content on a given campaign page by using tabs

• The timeline/deployment becomes a tab with a bigger picture view map (with everything) where users can drill deeper and see significant events and IOPs
• The platforms & instrument section can also use a map view, but focus on each platform flight
• The data products view can perhaps be a third tab
• Even if we move towards this design path, we probably won't implement it all at once, but just showing an idea.

[heidimok]

Closing this issue because we have sufficient design reference for the flight prototypes. Much of the further iteration to designs will be based on back/forth discussions between @willemarcel and @heidimok as prototyping is happening. A separate issue can be written as needed to formally document designs but for now this is as far as is required.

[willemarcel]

This is what we have implemented in the frontend until now. In this example, I have the DC-8 and ER-2 aircraft's flights.