A new GIS library
Previously, we published three-geo. Its accompanying demo app (geo-viewer) seems well conveying what’s possible using this library. Our focus is 3D-rendering capability of arbitrary geo locations in near real-time. Also, in geo-viewer, we carefully implemented and demonstrated simple but hopefully practical GIS features such as terrain measuring/marking. We designed geo-viewer extensible enough for its evolution in order to keep adding more GIS operations into it in future.
Future of geo-viewer
For terrain geometry modes, we currently have “satellite” and “wireframe” supported. We initially planned to include “contour” mode where 3D contours are rendered at 10-meter interval, but we couldn’t finalize it in time. So we are adding it in the next minor version updates of three-geo.
Finally, to bring GIS to VR, we use three-geo in our webcentric-VR platform. Since everything is written in the standard ES6 JavaScript and rendering is performed on top of three.js, VR-porting of the GIS features in geo-viewer is a rather straightforward task. This way, we can perform GIS application development targeting standard webapp and our VR platform at the same time.
In-situ experiences in webcentric-VR and beyond
In our VR-based GIS applications, we are going to investigate much more than merely showing the terrain as a 3D surface floating in space. In particular, we are now actively experimenting with using the 3D terrain as an environment, i.e. the terrain serves as a 3D background providing the user with in-situ experiences. Regarding this in-situ stuff, we’ve got valuable feedback citing a real-world application for space missions, and we are really excited about this direction.
We have already got working both terrain loading in VR and the in-situ context switching algorithm. We are now deploying an online version so that we can start asking for opinions/feedback from potential users. After this basic in-situ setup is completed, finally, we have the following experiments in mind:
- refining terrain meshes by remote sensing data from drones, and/or locally patch higher resolution textures surrounding the in-situ agent.
- augmenting educational 3D models (such as CyArk’s works) into in-situ VR scenes. (Also, here’s our ongoing experiments with OpenStreetMap buildings.)
- multi-party participation in VR scenes via WebRTC.
