Open Visualization Session Proposal: Going Global with 3D Tiles

[Kaapp]

Proposal

Handling global-scale 3D tilesets in loaders.gl with many levels of detail.

Topic of the session

Last summit, Justin and I gave a talk around how we'd been adopting 3d-tiles as an internal spec using loaders.gl, and the difficulties we'd encountered with calculating geometric error such that we could balance the display of different types of content.

Since then, we've continued to invest into 3d-tiles and are trying to scale that up to handle global-scale tilesets such as high-resolution terrain that contain millions of tiles. While we're still in the process of building that out, we've already encountered some interesting challenges.

Type of the session

• Collaborate
• Workshop
• Talk

Estimated duration of the session

~30 mins, about 20 for the talk and 5-10mins for questions.

Date and Time of the session

Open for discussion

Level

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced

Pre-requisite knowledge

A basic familiarity of the 3D tiles spec and tile/level-of-detail selection algorithms may help, but is not required.

Describe the session

Not yet finalised, but at a high level some of the challenges I think it'd be interesting to cover:

• The limitations with 3d-tiles version 1.0 when dealing with large tilesets and the push to version 1.1's implicit tiling scheme
• Why we're building a global terrain dataset, touching on the reasons we didn't want to use something like google's photorealistic tiles.
• The initial challenges we encountered as soon as we tried to load that tileset via loaders.gl
• How we're currently overcoming those challenges so we can render the data efficiently
• (TBD) Either how we would like to contribute that work back to loaders.gl for others to benefit from or hopefully how we've already done that (depending on how far we get by the time of the event!)

Session facilitator(s), Github handle(s) and timezone(s)

Chris Kapp (@Kaapp) - GMT/BST

Meeting notes and Virtual Meeting Link

Follow-up / Set-up sessions (if any)

Additional context (optional)

Time can be fairly flexible as the event is only a short walk from our office.

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[chrisgervang]

Hey Chris, just wanted to let you know the vis.gl TSC has accepted your submission! We'll follow up again with a proposed time slot. Looking forward to seeing you in London!

[Kaapp]

Great! Thanks Chris, look forward to being there!