Visualization Engine
IN3d™ is a visualization tool that supports building light weight Java viewer applications for visualizing a fusion of two-dimensional street images and three-dimensional data in a web browser. Applications built on IN3d provide an environment in which the user can navigate through a three-dimensional environment that blends two-dimensional street imagery with three-dimensional data. The imagery and data can be public, private, or a combination.
IN3d gives the user the ability to position themselves within the context of the three-dimensional environment. Buildings, infrastructure, and the street grid are visually blended together so that user experiences a virtual environment.
The three-dimensional model provides context to the two-dimensional street imagery, with visual correlation between the street imagery and the model, but also with computational and geographical correlation, producing a blended result that allows the user to experience an almost virtual environment. When the user clicks on a two-dimensional image of a building, ray tracing is used to correlate the image with an object on the underlying three-dimensional model of the city, and data from the three-dimensional model is overlaid on the two-dimensional street image, providing searchable content and additional information to the user.
IN3d not only integrates street imagery with the three-dimensional model, but it also integrates search results with the combined visualization. Data is associated to locations in the 3d model, and a virtual camera is used to navigate the user through the space.
Benefits
- Ability to associate data and content with locations in the model
- Integration of a three-dimensional city model with two-dimensional street imagery to create an almost seamless experience
Integration of the two-dimensional street imagery with the three-dimensional model is visual as well as functional:
- visual integration blends the two-dimensional street imagery with the three-dimensional model in a way that the user experiences the result as a virtual environment
- functional integration of the blended model allows buildings to be clickable, and geolocates a building object in the image and within the integrated environment
Key Features
Key features of IN3d:
- ability to calculate shortest path between locations on a street grid
- ability to create informational fly-bys by taking the virtual camera and projecting it along the path generated by a query
- ability to display a mark corresponding to search query results – engine that determines best way to display results to the user without cluttering the interface
- light beams provide immediate visual cue as to where search result is located that is not obscured by buildings, or hidden by other objects, and is visible at any elevation
- street network model is used to automate street label placement within the 2d street scenes
- bounding box collision detection between the camera and buildings in the model
Highlights
IN3d provides several key advantages over other visualization tools.
Customizable Rendering Style
IN3d favours the use of procedural shading and small sample textures over large texture atlases. The benefit of using a programmable pipeline shading model is that IN3d can generate realistic depictions of buildings without the usual heavy reliance on textures, improving the speed and quality of the result.
Sophisticated Camera Control
IN3d uses advanced quaternion-based mathematics, which makes the computations more efficient and provides more accurate results. This delivers a more natural and intuitive movement when moving through the model, more accurately simulating what a user would experience if actually moving through the real space.
Technical Summary
Operating Environment
- Java 6 with JNI caching enabled
- OpenGL 2.1
- Graphics card supporting OpenGL 2.1
- Windows
