Web-based visualization component for geo-information

Abstract

Three-dimensional visualization of maps is becoming an increasingly important issue on the Internet. The growing computing power of consumer devices and the establishment of new technologies like HTML5 and WebGL allow a plug-in free display of 3D geo applications directly in the browser. Existing software solutions like Google Earth or Cesium either lack the necessary customizability or fail to deliver a realistic representation of the world. In this work a browser-based visualization component for geo-information is designed and a prototype is implemented in the gaming engine Unity3D. Unity3D allows translating the implementation to JavaScript and to embed it in the browser with WebGL. A comparison of the prototype with the open-source geo-visualization framework Cesium shows, that while maintaining an acceptable performance an improvement of the visual quality is achieved. Another reason to use a gaming engine as platform for our streaming algorithm is that they usually feature engines for physics, audio, traffic simulations and more, which we want to use in our future work.