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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Earth lately? Google Earth is insanely awesome. https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco,+CA/@37.8129... This is good too, but Google is doing it more performantly as far as I can tell.
Google has a different budget, Melown is a startup based in Prague with 10 great developers.
The state of the art in open source 3D mapping right now is CesiumJS[0]. From browsing their docs, it looks like it's in a similar place, capabilities-wise. Unfortunately, the limiting factor for most projects isn't the JS library, but it's the availability of high-resolution DEMs (digital elevation models). These won't become widely available until we do something about the price of lidar. Fortunately, there's a lot…
You can cheaply generate approximate DEM from drone imagery. E.g. DroneDreploy.
The state of the art in open source 3D mapping right now is CesiumJS[0]. From browsing their docs, it looks like it's in a similar place, capabilities-wise. Unfortunately, the limiting factor for most projects isn't the JS library, but it's the availability of high-resolution DEMs (digital elevation models). These won't become widely available until we do something about the price of lidar. Fortunately, there's a lot…
DEMs: how high-res do you really need the DEMs, how many petabytes will you sacrifice for sub-meter accuracy? Unless the app is for mountaineers, what's out there for free in lower-res (to be interpolated by varying to-be-experimented-with smart algos/heuristics throughout academia) and affordably handle-able on a global scale [1] should be a perfectly sufficient starting point until users actually complain about min…
In late 2015, I spent a couple weeks researching GIS data conversion utilities, Cesium's formats, and potential improved source datasets we could use to generate higher-quality imagery and terrain data. I can't haul out the relevant writeup atm, but I concluded that the EarthEnv DEM90 dataset appeared to be highest-quality free terrain source I could find ([0]), and the TrueMarble collection was the best free imagery source ([1]).
I generated our earlier terrain dataset using the Cesium-Terrain-Builder utility ([2]). It generates Cesium's "heightmap" format, but does not yet support the "quantized-mesh" format. I have seen a couple other tools that appear to deal with quantized-mesh tiles, though. On my list to dig into at some point.
As a related note, using the MBTiles format ([3]) for storing and moving tile datasets around is great. Multiple gigabytes in a single SQLite database file (or possibly a few files split by zoom level), rather than trying to move around millions of individual 10KB images on disk. Highly recommended.
[0] http://www.earthenv.org/DEM.html
[1] http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/global_data/true_marble/dow...
Something is wrong with navigation on my machine. Mouse movements are opposite my expectation (I guess just a preference), and the movements are so sensitive it jumps around a lot and I can't really navigate where I intend to. I'm on an iMac w/magic mouse.
The state of the art in open source 3D mapping right now is CesiumJS[0]. From browsing their docs, it looks like it's in a similar place, capabilities-wise. Unfortunately, the limiting factor for most projects isn't the JS library, but it's the availability of high-resolution DEMs (digital elevation models). These won't become widely available until we do something about the price of lidar. Fortunately, there's a lot…
With all due respect to the folks at AGI and the amazing work they put to CesiumJS, Melown is a very different product tailored at different use cases. We developed Melown bottom-up as a platform for interactive rendering True3D (photogrammetric or lidar based) data, at street-level detail and planetary scale. Cesium on the other hand, is essentially a 2.5D (DEM) rendering library with some interesting add-ons.
Melown now natively supports 2.5D data and Cesium has incorporated support for True3D data through its "3D tiles" standard. This makes the two systems look similar in appearance, though they are by no means similar by design and there differences show once you work with anything more complex than simple demos.
As one of the authors of Melown (and a person with only very limited knowledge of Cesium) I tend to see many advantages in Melown data model, such as support for multiple reference frames (see [0] and [1]), powerful data integration capabilities, state of the art geodata rendering (complete with styles similar to the ones used by Mapbox), and most importantly, performance when dealing with large scale True3D data. Cesium users would probably point out to its support for temporal datasets and wide-array of connectors for various GIS formats.
In the end the choice depends on where your priorities are. I sincerely doubt you could base a website such as the one at [2] on Cesium due to some important data integration issues. Perhaps some people more knowledgeable of Cesium might prove me wrong.
Of course, there is one more important difference between Cesium and Melown. Melown, at this time, is not yet fully open-sourced yet. But that difference is not going to be there much longer. We at Melown will be open-sourcing not only the JS library, but much of the server-side data management software, hopefully providing web and desktop/mobile software developers with whole new array of choice when dealing with the challenges of modern 3D mapping application development.
[0] https://melown.com/mercury [1] http://tinyurl.com/zk6xqnq [2] https://melown.com/intergeo2016
The state of the art in open source 3D mapping right now is CesiumJS[0]. From browsing their docs, it looks like it's in a similar place, capabilities-wise. Unfortunately, the limiting factor for most projects isn't the JS library, but it's the availability of high-resolution DEMs (digital elevation models). These won't become widely available until we do something about the price of lidar. Fortunately, there's a lot…
> Unfortunately, the limiting factor for most projects isn't the JS library, but it's the availability of high-resolution DEMs (digital elevation models). These won't become widely available until we do something about the price of lidar. You can cheaply generate approximate DEM from drone imagery. E.g. DroneDreploy.