If you haven't already, you guys should absolutely get some inspiration from Baidu's amazing 3D city maps. http://j.map.baidu.com/m8vSh
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
#52If you haven't already, you guys should absolutely get some inspiration from Baidu's amazing 3D city maps. http://j.map.baidu.com/m8vSh
Some of the maps for China are stunning, we've definitely been using few of them for inspiration.
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#53The Ordnance Survey doesn't even hold height data on all buildings in the UK. They've started a few isolated projects but nothing as a deliverable dataset yet. I don't think there's a US equivalent despite your link to NYC Open Data.
You might want to look to Germany and CityGML. You might discover some town datasets that are complete in height and geometry detail.
If you happen on a LIDAR data source you've then got to tidy up against the buildings but you will run into errors caused by the time spent between the two data capture points. There's SRTM but i'm sure it'll be too coarse for your needs. I'm sure there's a replacement to SRTM but the name escapes me.
There's LandXplorer - now owned by Autodesk which will generate models from oblique aerial photogrammetry. There's also CityEngine that'll create fake cities based upon road networks.
@AndyBMapMan.
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#54I 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…
Ah, thank you for your reply.
There was a WebGL 3D flying simulator on HN few weeks back which used the sky and light changes to great effect. Perhaps something like morning rush hour traffic against evening or rainy days againts sunny.
I'll definetely have to delve more into PostGIS. Three.js should follow when I get a better graps of D3. I think there was an example on how to generate a satellite 3D like map from GeoJSON at Mike Bostocks example site.
Very exciting stuff!
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#55Crossing 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.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately -- What's most interesting to me is the implications for urban data modeling and prediction when the end user has full control of how the data is used. Remember that article a few weeks back about the fellow who used the new SimCity to model his town's traffic problems? Imagine if you had full control over the model and can tweak the city at any level you want, not just what the game UI allows you to adjust (e.g. feeding in data from a government API)? Urban planners could potentially get a lot of useful information from gamers playing around with variables in their city.
Another interesting idea could be turning a city into a sort of MMORPG where each user has control over a smaller section of the city (instead of the whole thing). If the user only pays attention to optimizing a small part of the city, interesting patterns could emerge in the overall model.
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#56The Ordnance Survey doesn't even hold height data on all buildings in the UK. They've started a few isolated projects but nothing as a deliverable dataset yet. I don't think there's a US equivalent despite your link to NYC Open Data. You might want to look to Germany and CityGML. You might discover some town datasets that are complete in height and geometry detail. If you happen on a LIDAR data source you've then got…
Thanks for the reply Andy, appreciated. We're actually talking to Ordnance Survey atm so hopefully we can work something out. Building height data for the UK (that's available outside higher education) is a pain to get hold of so I'm hoping we can work something out.
I'll definitely look into the CityGML stuff, it sounds great.
LIDAR is certainly something we're keen to explore further. If anything, it'll get us a much more accurate estimation of height, at least better than an educated guess or via SRTM (which is way to low detail and can't be relied on for buildings).
The CityEngine stuff is amazing. I've not actually played with it myself yet but I've been having a good look at it during my research. Would be cool to have a go on it at some point.
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#57I 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?
Sure. Mail sent.
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Have you tried merging geometry?
http://learningthreejs.com/blog/2011/10/05/performance-mergi...
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I haven't had a chance to look yet, but yes, try merging the geometry first.
Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, you can check out some of my stuff on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/sk0re
It's somewhat mixed, but there is a good amount of ambient stuff in there as well. (Also note that almost all of it - except for the one remix - is CC licensed.)
Would sure love to help out any way I can!