title

Solution

The solution done in the allotted time is fairly simple:

get the tile at some zoom at some lon lat
get the bounding box for the tile
create a plane geometry with textureSize - 1 segments (textureSize vertices)
create a shader that reads the texture
- UV is scaled by 511/512 and translated by 0.5/512 to align the center of the pixel to the vertex
- height is unpacked using the formula
- height is applied in world space
- normals are computed from neigboring vertices using the texture
- height is normalized using the height range obtained from the texture
scale the mesh in the horizontal plane by the size of the bounding box
fetch the texture
- find height range
- assign to material

Aligning different zooms using bounding boxes failed.
I dont understand how the first zoom level relates to the rest of the tiles since its aspect ratio is very skinny
- Higher zoom levels converge to aspect of 1, but the very next is much closer to 1 (first is 2-3?)