Show HN: ViziCities 0.3 – Framework for geospatial visualisation in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ViziCities 0.3 – Framework for geospatial visualisation in the browser

github.com

89 pointsrobhawkes20 comments

I'm Robin, the creator of ViziCities. Feel free to ask me any questions about the 3D geospatial framework, UrbanSim or anything else :)

Why didn't you call it GeoCities?

All right, I'll get my coat.

Haha! I'm actually annoyed at myself for not thinking of that sooner ;)

Really cool project, definitely something I might find useful in the near future.

Is there a way to connect attributes/metadata to each building and access it by clicking on a building?

Yes, though it's too much to explain in a comment here. Take a look at the interactivity example as that should hopefully show how it can be done: https://github.com/UDST/vizicities/blob/master/examples/inte...

can you point it at anywhere in the world and get a decent map?

How well does it render countryside?

There is new lidar data being released by various countries - can it load and use any of that?

I ask as i have been planning to make a browser based height map of the local countryside for my archeology hobby.

The examples on the GitHub repo (like this basic one: http://vizicities.com/demos/basic/) use an OpenStreetMap tile endpoint provided by Mapzen and so will work anywhere in the world. The caveat being that the OpenStreetMap data varies in quality around the world. However, in that case you could use a better quality GeoJSON-based dataset for the area you're interested in if it exists.

Countryside rendering depends on what you want to see. You may not see many buildings but you'll see the underlying map on the 2D basemap and you can always decide to output (or ignore) specific things like roads or fields or trees. This obviously depends on whether that data exists and exactly how you want to output it.

By default ViziCities can't do anything with LIDAR data yet but it's on the list of things to add in the future.

The software looks neat. But for the above user, is there an option to vertically exaggerate the topography?

There will be soon, yes. Right now the ground is flat in ViziCities but there are plans to add 3D terrain, though it's not a simple feat. It's possible to extend ViziCities to do this yourself.

This looks incredible. Thank you Robin!

My pleasure! Glad you like it :)

As someone recently new to Geo visualization (and data viz in general), I have to say this project looks awesome! Kudos for all the hard work put into this

Thank you, glad you like it! :)

Hey Rob,

Congrats on the new release! ViziCities is one of the top geospatial frameworks out there and very excited to see it continuously improving.

Your "Lessons Learnt" development post on mozilla a couple years back was absolutely invaluable.

Thank you! I'm glad that you found the development post on MozHacks useful – I should really do a 2016 updated version...

This looks great, congrats!

It's a bit slow on my machine (the linked demos), is that a general issue due to 3d rendering capabilities, or is just the data source for the demos slow?

Thank you!

The performance could be a bit of both I imagine – a computer with a weak GPU or a visualisation at sufficiently large resolution will strain the framerate, especially the higher quality demos (eg. "All The Things").

The data sources are remote and so you may notice tiles and data taking a little while to load before popping into view. This is something I'm looking to improve with more sophisticated networking and Web Workers for background processing without locking up the browser.

It is - just tried it out on my work machine, a little faster now (with much better GPU).

So, how does this compares to Cesium.js and Worldwind?

I've no experience of Worldwind but Cesium and ViziCities both use WebGL and both display the same kind of data. Cesium is built around the concept of a round, globe-like representation of the world whereas ViziCities is a flat representation of the world. ViziCities is arguably simpler to use and simpler in functionality, whereas Cesium is built with scientific and incredibly accurate scientific data visualisation in mind (eg. satellite positioning).

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