Open-source 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Open-source 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub

viziciti.es

35 pointsrobhawkes14 comments

This seemed like such a fascinating project when you first unveiled it. I'm really glad you've decided to make it open source. I look forward to diving in and seeing how it works.

Thanks! It's a good feeling to have something released and for it to be open. We've still a long way to go. Let me know how you get on!

Awesome. Just when I was finishing my D3 visualizations. Trying not to get too distracted... ;)

Any chance you could publish the heat map you had in the first demo? I'd love to get a head start in integrating 2D layers to this. Even if it were some less than functional code.

I presume OpenStreetMap sends map data as vectors, so it should not be too difficult to replace that with other geo sources. I immediately see a dozen use cases even with relatively static data.

Thank you :)

Glad you like it. I'll be working on getting the data vis stuff back into ViziCities soon (heatmaps, etc). The data processing classes should give you a little more insight into how to get new layers into ViziCites. Admittedly, it's not as easy as it could be yet.

This is nice! I recently came across another similar project: http://cesiumjs.org/

How does this compare with it? Is ViziCities more focused on political / city data, while Cesium is focused on geographic data?

Yeah, ViziCities is focussed on the low-level detail (building and vechicle-level) while Cesium and others are focussed at a higher level.

This looks great. Where does the building height data in the demo come from (or is that made up?)

Thanks! It's from OpenStreetMap, if available, otherwise made up (for now). In the future we'll be more accurate (perhaps lidar), at least a better educated guess.

You can infer building height from OSM through either an explicit height tag (usually in meters), or from a "levels" tag, that you can convert with some kind of estimate of standard floor height. Here's a demo that lets you see where that data exists: http://osmbuildings.org/?lat=52.52111&lon=13.40988&zoom=16

Thanks! That's actually exactly how we do it right now, based on the techniques in OSM Buildings actually. Ideally I want to infer height from area and building type if no height-based tags exist. I have a proof-of-concept working.

Great work :), I wanted to do something like that since long time...I will try to participate.

Thank you! I hope you do participate :)

Great!

Glad you like it!

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