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ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

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31–40 of 67 posts

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#31
My god, that is amazing and wonderful.

You should be hired by the uk.gov team to work on this full-time.

This, combined with various statistical information (crime, traffic, other stuff from the ONS) would be a huge boon to anyone using it and the interface makes it beginner friendly.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#32

My god, that is amazing and wonderful. You should be hired by the uk.gov team to work on this full-time. This, combined with various statistical information (crime, traffic, other stuff from the ONS) would be a huge boon to anyone using it and the interface makes it beginner friendly.

Thanks!

We'd love to talk to the data.gov.uk guys about working together, though I have no contacts there atm.

We do plan to visualise huge quantities of data, including the datasets you mentioned. Most of what we've been using so far is from the 2011 Census, as well as the Indices of Multiple Deprivation.

Traffic too, we're looking into using the live data from TFL to do some cool stuff.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#33
post #30

This is amazing! It was cool to see the process of turning data points into a 3d city.. Combine this with the Occulus Rift and the Singularity won't be that far away :)

If only I could get my hands on an Occulus Rift. We'd love to do some cool things with it!

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#34

My god, that is amazing and wonderful. You should be hired by the uk.gov team to work on this full-time. This, combined with various statistical information (crime, traffic, other stuff from the ONS) would be a huge boon to anyone using it and the interface makes it beginner friendly.

Thanks! We'd love to talk to the data.gov.uk guys about working together, though I have no contacts there atm. We do plan to visualise huge quantities of data, including the datasets you mentioned. Most of what we've been using so far is from the 2011 Census, as well as the Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Traffic too, we're looking into using the live data from TFL to do some cool stuff.

This is exactly the sort of thing the whole "Show us a better way" site was supposed to encourage. I took a stab at some stuff using various sources but didn't have enough time (Edit: or skill, or access to data sources).

While I appreciate some of the game related stuff this looks most promising for allowing people to easy see statistical information at-a-glance, data journalism etc.

The NapTAN datbase would be an awesome addition that should be relatively easy to add.

Regarding the data.gov.uk team. They do have a twitter account and website, hit them, hit them hard. Even if they can only smooth the way for data access (Like the building heights) that would be awesome.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We'd love to talk to the data.gov.uk guys about working together, though I have no contacts there atm. We do plan to visualise huge quantities of data, including the datasets you mentioned. Most of what we've been using so far is from the 2011 Census, as well as the Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Traffic too, we're looking into using the live data from TFL to do some cool stuff.

This is exactly the sort of thing the whole "Show us a better way" site was supposed to encourage. I took a stab at some stuff using various sources but didn't have enough time (Edit: or skill, or access to data sources). While I appreciate some of the game related stuff this looks most promising for allowing people to easy see statistical information at-a-glance, data journalism etc. The NapTAN datbase would be an a…

Thanks for the advice, we'll definitely follow up on it! And I agree, the data side of things is very interesting and is something we're keen to explore as a separate entity to the playful/art aspect.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#36
post #22

Crossing my fingers real hard for somebody to pick this up eventually to make a no-nonsense FOSS SimCity clone out of this. Please, please, please.

That would certainly be kinda cool. My recent background is in HTML5 games (I used to work at Mozilla) and I'd love take what we've done so far with ViziCities and see how a game would look.

Do I hear a kickstarter coming? ;-)

Holler if you need somebody to make some music. Heavily into making ambient stuff right now anyways...

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#37
post #23

Wow, very interesting, this tickles my fancy... Imagine something like this but with an airfield, you could model the airfield and every airplane landing and getting up in real-time.

Thanks! Real-time air traffic (inc. landing and taking off) is something that we're looking into.

Awesome! Looking forward to what you come up with

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#38
I am working on something similar with the prospect of getting CannonJS physics to work so that one can walk the city (in my case procedurally generated): https://twitter.com/dirkk/status/309024330115842049

I also tried a multi-device approach for visualisation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TiZzovx5YE

Any chance of collaboration?

From this thread I reckon there are quite a few people working on something similar. I guess it would be extremely cool if we could join forces.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#39
I would love to see more details about this.

How did you implement your data path from getting GIS data (shapefiles I presume) to PostGIS then GeoJSON and finally into ThreeJS?

What about combining the statistical data with the location?

And the heatmap/choropleth, is that something Three.js can do?

I have no knowledge of developing 3D stuff, but I have been looking into using D3 with canvas rendering just for this kind of visualizations. I'm playing with multidimensional data as stacked 3D cubes. So, getting something like this would really bootstrap my project to another level. Any thoughts about open sourcing?

In all, this looks very useful and expendable. The sky is the limit. Literally, when is sky coming? ;)

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#40
post #16

> Unfortunately, in our efforts for global domination we quickly discovered the performance limitations of the project as it stood, as well as my personal knowledge with Three.js and WebGL. In short, the expanded version of London ran at a horrible 20–40fps depending on the system you viewed it on. You got a lot farther than me when I tried Three.js before hitting performance problems. I was trying to make a WebGL 3d…

Any chance you could put that up / a version of it up on jsFiddle or something so I can edit it online and see how I can help? There's a few techniques that I could play with. 1000 objects should be silky smooth…

Here you go: http://jsfiddle.net/chime/xs4MK/3/

Thanks so much! Everyone is welcome to share/extend this. If the 3D part works better, I can make a JS function to convert: 1-WH-[001:011]{A:D}, 30,{0},[20] into:

{"1-WH-001A":[30,0,20,1,1,1,10329599],"1-WH-001B":[30,1,20,1,1,1,10198015],"1-WH-001C":[30,2,20,1,1,1,10987519]}

The data is in the format bin:[x,y,z,sx,sy,sz,color] - the color will obviously be dependent on the data. Position and size are fixed in most warehouse simulations.

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