3D segment replay
Any thermal, glide or task leg of an activity can be replayed in 3D right on the activity page. Click the cube icon on the row you're interested in and a 3D box opens next to the tables — the relief in wireframe, your trace as a tube coloured by climb rate, and a cursor that flies the segment for you.
It is not the full 3D player: it is a focused, instant view of one segment, built for debriefing a single climb or a single glide without losing your place in the analysis.
Where to find it
The cube icon sits next to the chart icon on every segment row:
| Where | Segment |
|---|---|
| Flight analysis — per-thermal table | One thermal (T#1, T#2, …) |
| Phases panel — Best glides / Worst glides | One glide, labelled by its glide ratio (e.g. 8.4:1) |
| WeGlide panel — Legs | One leg of the declared or scored task |
The chart icon right beside it still does what it always did: zoom the 2D map and the graph onto the same segment. The two are complementary — zoom the graph for the numbers, open the 3D for the shape.
Nothing to download in advance
The 3D engine is fetched only on your first click (the icon spins while it loads), so it costs nothing to visitors who never open it. Every following segment opens instantly.
What you see
The trace — a tube along your GPS fixes, coloured by climb rate using the same ramp as the climb-rate heatmap: deep navy at zero, through blue, teal and green, to red at +4 m/s and above. Below zero the navy darkens toward black, so sink reads visibly heavier than a flat glide. The tube thickness adapts to the segment: a tight 80 m spiral and a 12 km drifting climb both stay readable.
The terrain — the real relief around the segment, drawn as a wireframe over a solid surface so you can judge your clearance and see which ridge you were working. It loads a fraction of a second after the trace; if it can't be fetched, a neutral grid stands in and the replay still works.
Entry and exit gates — two amber tunnels the trace flies through, marking the exact bounds of the segment, each labelled with its altitude. A little context before and after the segment is included so the entry and the exit read naturally instead of starting in mid-air.
The thermal core (thermals only) — a stack of translucent green discs hugging your circles, one per 40 m altitude band. Each disc is centred on the average centre of your circles in that band, with its average radius: where the discs stack neatly, you were centred; where they wander, you were orbiting. Drifting climbs spread over kilometres show no discs — there's no meaningful core to draw.
The playback cursor — a white collar around the tube with a tag reading the current altitude and climb rate, plus the local time in the control bar.
Playing it back
The replay starts on its own and loops. When it opens, the camera does one slow 360° orbit around the segment — then playback takes over.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Play / Pause | Toggles the replay. Your choice is remembered: the next segment you open starts the same way. |
| Restart | Back to the entry gate. |
| ‹ › | Step one GPS fix at a time (pauses the replay). |
| Gradient icon | Shows or hides the climb-rate scale. Your choice is kept across visits. |
| Recenter | Smoothly flies the camera back to the wide view of the whole segment. |
| Drag / scroll | Orbit and zoom freely at any time. |
Playback runs at a constant 10 GPS fixes per second (≈10× real time), so a long climb genuinely takes longer to watch than a short one — the duration on screen tells you something about the duration in the air.
The climb-rate scale is a column of colour blocks, coarsest at the top (+4 m/s) down to −2 m/s. Click it to expand it with the values. While the replay runs, the block matching your current climb rate grows — a live vario next to the trace.
Framing
Thermals open close to the entry gate, standing back against the drift and looking slightly down the climb axis, so the spiral rises through the frame with the exit near the top. Glides and legs open on the wide view of the whole segment. Either way, Recenter always brings you back to the full segment.
On desktop and on mobile
On a wide screen (≥ 992 px) the 3D box docks in the left column of the activity page and follows the scroll, so you can keep reading the thermal table while the segment plays beside it. On narrower screens it opens as a fullscreen overlay.
Close it with the × or the Escape key.
Altitudes in your units
Altitudes follow your unit preference (metres or feet); climb rates are always shown in m/s, like everywhere else in the analysis. The 3D scene itself is never distorted by the unit choice.
Needs WebGL
The viewer needs hardware 3D acceleration in the browser. Where it isn't available, the cube icon falls back to opening the full 3D player at the start of that segment — the behaviour this button had before.
Where to go next
- Flight analysis & coaching — the thermal table, the centring figure and the quality score the 3D view illustrates.
- The full 3D player — the whole flight, with athletes, weather, cameras and video export.
- The 2D & 3D viewer — how the activity page itself is organised.