3D Cities Rendering and Visualisation: A Web-Based Solution

Abstract

3D cities reconstruction and visualisation have always been a challenging area. Many software have been developed for constructing, editing and visualising 3D virtual cities. These software that allow the semi-automatic generation of virtual cities whether destined for visualisation, simulation and games have largely reduced the cost and charges of manual generation and sometimes their work outstrips the geometry to reach the semantics at a higher level. However, for faster and better performance, we are focusing on the visualisation and management of real-world data and more precisely geographic data for the web. This data is written in different standards and is largely available to users and cost free. This paper proposes a user intuitive solution based on the quite recent ArcGIS software Application Programming Interface (API) and CityGML (Geography Markup Language) in order to visualise and manage a real interactive editable city.