Authors:
Arash Shahbaz Badr
and
Raffaele De Amicis
Affiliation:
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, SW Park Terrace, Corvallis, OR, U.S.A.
Keyword(s):
GIS, Virtual Geographic Environments, Smart Cities, Geovisualization, Immersive Environments, Open-source, Game Engines.
Abstract:
Game engines (GEs) constitute a powerful platform for visualizing real geographies in immersive virtual space, and in the last two years, remarkable strides have been made by the leading providers of Geographic Information System (GIS) software and services, including Esri and Cesium, toward integrating their products in GEs. Notwithstanding the strengths of GEs, they lack support for many common GIS file formats, and there exist only limited georeferencing possibilities. Visualizing large-scale geolocations involves high authoring costs, and the shortcomings of GEs further complicate the workflow. In this paper, we present a workflow and its implementation for creating large immersive virtual environments that accurately represent real-world urban areas. The benefits of the presented development are threefold. First, it makes the process more efficient by automating multiple steps and incorporating a large portion of the workflow inside the GE. Second, it facilitates an interactive
framework by allowing the developer to efficiently extend the scene components with functionalities and interactions. Third, it entirely relies on open-source software and data, making it suitable for many non-commercial domains. To showcase the effectiveness of the tool, we created a virtual replica of an actual city consisting of the terrain, the streets, and the buildings.
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