VIABILITY TESTING OF GAME ENGINE USAGE FOR VISUALIZATION OF 3D GEOSPATIAL DATA WITH OGC STANDARDS

Abstract

Urban digital twins have become an essential factor for cities and communities to visualize, simulate and analyze data. The conventional geospatial standards work great with online platforms such as CesiumJS or ArcGIS API for JavaScript. However, their usage in different platforms such as game engines has not been well established yet. Game engines provide an interesting application case because they offer a different approach to visualizing large city models and provide a high graphical fidelity.This paper aims to answer how the existing standards, such as the API standards GeoVolumes and SensorThings, as well as the 3D model standards 3D Tiles and Esri Indexed 3D Scene Layer (I3S), can interact with game engines. For this purpose, three use-cases were selected and have been used to build applications. These focus on using sensor data in AR and different city development scenarios in a digital environment.This study shows that different geospatial standard formats such as 3D Tiles, I3S, and GL Transmission Format (glTF) can be used in game engines, either directly or over a GeoVolumes Server. Their implementation makes it possible to use the advantages of game engines with real-world datasets.