Visualizing Large 3D city models in the Web

In this 1.5h tutorial that I gave at the Web3D 2014 conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada I presented different tools to prepare large geospatial data sets (in particular 3D city models), so they can be visualized in the Web.

The presentation starts with a motivating example explaining how 3D city models in the Web can help urban planners and decision makers to present their policy plans to the public to engage all stakeholders in the planning process.

Most of the talk consisted of a live demo where I actually converted a large CityGML model to X3D to put it into the web browser using WebGL/X3DOM.

Transcript

1. VISUALIZING LARGE 3D CITY MODELS IN THE WEB (FOR PUBLIC PARTICIPATION) Michel Krämer
3. PROJECT www.iqmulus.eu IQmulus
4. PROJECT www.urbanapi.eu
5. Planner
6. Decision maker
7. Public
8. Public
9. Citizens 666
10. NIMBY Not In My Backyard!
11. LULU Locally Unpopular Land Use
12. NIMFY Not In My Frontyard Either!
13. NOPE Not On Planet Earth!
14. CAVE Citizens Against Virtually Everything
15. WUTBÜRGER Citizens Against Virtually Everything
16. TOP-DOWN POLICY MAKING Politics Citizens
17. BOTTOM-UP POLICY MAKING Politics Citizens
18. POLICY CYCLE SURVEY ANALYZE PLAN STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT IMPLEMENT EVALUATE
19. HOW TO IMPLEMENT THIS?
20. HOW TO REACH A AUDIENCE? LARGE
21. HTML5 Logo by W3C
22. WHAT ABOUT REALLY 3D CITY MODELS? LARGE
24. MAINZ 240 km² 147 048 buildings 240 terrain tiles 240 orthophotos (JPG, 25cm/px) (XYZ TINs) (CityGML, LOD2) 5.4 GB = 59 305 acres
25. STEPS Transform Convert Optimize Simplify Merge 1 2 3 4 5
26. SUMMARY Transform & convert buildings Optimize buildings for the Web 1 2 3 cs3d-transform (CityServer3D) aopt (InstantReality) Transform & convert terrain cs3d-transform
27. Simplify terrain (optional) Optimize terrain for the Web 4 5 6 MeshLab aopt Merge orthophotos gdal_translate (GDAL)
28. Merge and convert terrain Transform merged terrain 7 8 9 cs3d-merge MeshLab Simplify merged terrain MeshLab
29. OUTLOOK X3DOM 2.0 Shape Resource Container SRC – A Streamable Format for Generalized Web-based 3D Data Transmission Max Limper, Maik Thöner, Johannes Behr, Dieter W. Fellner Streaming in the Web OGC 3D Portrayal Service Workshop: Geospatial information on the Web, Mike McCann (& Volker Coors) Right after the break
30. Michel Krämer Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD Fraunhoferstraße 5 64283 Darmstadt, Germany michel.kraemer@igd.fraunhofer.de +49 6151 155 415