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

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

#42

Post by rohern »

robhawkes wrote: post #9
rohern wrote: post #6

This is a terrific blog post. Excellent project and excellent sharing. I feel like we have a lot of games set in real world cities to look forward to. Also: autonomous vehicle pathing?

Thanks! The vehicle path side of things is something I'd love to explore in more detail at a later date. Right now it's all rather basic but it could certainly be a whole lot more interesting.

Considering the incredible amount you have already achieved, I am optimistic.

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

#45

Post by robhawkes »

arpineh wrote: post #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 k…

> The sky is the limit. Literally, when is sky coming? ;)

Definitely one of my favourite comments about the project so far! =p

The rough and ready approach we took to transforming data was to import the shapefiles into PostGIS using pgShapeLoader, doing any manipulation in PostGIS and exporting straight out to GeoJSON using the ST_ToGeoJSON method in PostGIS, or using the GeoJSON options in ogr2ogr. From there it's a simple case of importing the JSON into Three.js and constructing the objects from the vertex coordinates.

Re: Combining statistical data with the geographic data, we can do that with GeoJSON and you can use ogr2ogr to include related data about each location when exporting to GeoJSON.

The choropleth map is something we constructed from scratch. In reality, it's nothing more than a bunch of shapes in Three.js that each have a different material colour – it's very simple.

D3.js is a fantastic place to start. In fact, that's exactly where we started with all this. We actually use the Geo module within D3 for a few parts of ViziCities.

We haven't decided yet about opening the full project but we'll certainly be documenting and releasing aspects of it (most of the juicy bits). We'll announce that via the @ViziCities Twitter account.

As for the sky… it's coming ;)

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

#46

Post by robhawkes »

n3rdy wrote: post #44

Are those clouds I see in that blurred image? Are you teasing us with the prospect of 3d weather (perhaps by using radar data)? If not that's cool, but if so, great idea.

Mayhaps ;)

But seriously, weather and night/day cycles is something we're looking into.

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

#47

Post by robhawkes »

skore wrote: post #36
robhawkes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Hadn't considered it. If we need the money we may give it a go!

Re: Music. Do you have any examples of your stuff anywhere? We'll be having music and effects of some sort but haven't yet looked into it much.

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

#48

Post by robhawkes »

dirkk0 wrote: post #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.…

Very cool, thanks for sharing it! The multi-device thing is something we're actually keen to explore; we basically want to replicate the Liquid Galaxy thing that Google did.

We haven't yet worked out what we're doing re: opening the project and collaboration but we're open to talk more. Mind reaching out to us via hello@vizicities.com?

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

#50

Post by robhawkes »

a_n_onymous wrote: post #41

FWIW, Nokia L&C does not have "massive development teams" working on HTML5 visualization of geo-data, quite the opposite...

While I know you're right (I was being over zealous), I'm quite sure it wasn't 2 guys in their spare time with zero budget.
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