CityGML goes mobile: application of large 3D CityGML models on smartphones

Abstract

CityGML, a semantic information model for digital/virtual city models has become quite popular in various scenarios. While the data format is still actively under development, it is already supported by different software solutions, especially GIS-based desktop applications. Mobile systems on the other hand are still neglected, even though the georeferenced objects of CityGML have many application fields, for example, in the currently popular area of location-based Augmented Reality. In this paper we present an independent multi-platform CityGML viewer, its architecture and specific implementation techniques that we use to realize and optimize the process of visualizing CityGML data for use in Augmented Reality. The main focus lies in improving the implementation on mobile devices, such as smartphones, and assessing its usability and performance in comparison to web-based approaches. Due to the constrained hardware resources of smartphones, it is a particular challenge to handle complex 3D objects and large virtual worlds as provided by CityGML, not only in terms of memory and storage space, but also with respect to mobile processing units and display sizes.