From 2D to 3D GIS: A Game Changer for Fayetteville, NC

CyberCity 3D, Inc. and the historic City of Fayetteville, NC today announced the city’s move from 2D to 3D GIS mapping, a transformation focused on interoperability, high scalability, and wide reach. The result: a more engaging and detailed 3D streaming map that’s elevated the city’s planning and development capabilities.

The City of Fayetteville’s GIS Manager, Richard Tuinstra, spearheaded the plan to design a mapping system that utilized three-dimensional mapping and web-based architecture while getting a high rate of return on the investment. Tuinstra took an approach outside the traditional GIS “box”, seeking content that could run on scalable web architecture. He found CyberCity 3D, Inc., a leader in geospatial city modeling headquartered near Los Angeles, CA.

"The City of Fayetteville has always understood the great benefits of using 3D GIS for its daily operations, from Public Safety, Parks and Recreation to Urban Design and Planning, but has found it difficult to get a good start,” stated Tuinstra. “Partnering with CyberCity has made our first steps in 3D GIS a quick and easy process. The result so far has been well received by our City Manager’s office and the City staff members. Some of the great advantages of this mapping system are that it only requires a simple web browser and is very user friendly. We can’t wait to expand geographically and thematically on what we have achieved right now.”

According to the City’s Information Technology Director, Dwayne Campbell, the plan had to include three requirements. “First, it had to avoid costly, time-consuming training and software licensing. Second, the solution needed to be delivered as a software service in an open environment capable of running on all mobile devices. Finally, the City needed a strategy that enabled it to continue to leverage our existing investment in Esri’s ArcGIS software.”
The City ultimately chose the combination of CyberCity 3D buildings for their accuracy and interoperability, while looking to CesiumJS.org for its open source 3D globe mapping. CyberCity 3D created more than 550 buildings for the project, from best-in-practices photogrammetry, to insure GIS integrity and flexibility. CyberCity 3D also provided imagery and street names via its streaming images services on the Cesium 3D Globe; as a government institution, the City of Fayetteville pays no streaming fees for the 3D Globe and image layers. In addition, the city requested a tree layer; the existing GIS zoning and district mapping data the city generated with Arc GIS software was also seamlessly included.

“The unique combination of CyberCity 3D’s buildings, the Cesium 3D Globe, and ArcGIS software create an unsurpassed mapping system for the City of Fayetteville,” stated CyberCity 3D CEO Kevin DeVito. “This dynamic move to 3D will enable the city to best plan for its future while engaging its employees, stakeholders and the community at large in an immersive manner.”

As an early adopter, the City of Fayetteville has gone from using 2D PDF maps to owning cutting edge, 3D GIS content on a platform that reaches not only city employees and stakeholders, but every citizen. This dynamic solution vastly increases their understanding of the geospatial elements of the city. Its deployment also allows for the easy addition of other GIS layers such as business points of interest or FEMA poly-layers for environmental planning and sustainability, expanding the map’s usefulness, engagement, and ROI.

About CyberCity 3D, Inc.: Southern California-based CyberCity 3D, Inc. is a global leader in modeling and streaming 3D content for smart cities as well as those who build them. The Company’s core technology is its patented 3D modeling process. CyberCity 3D buildings offer the best-in-class smart data and up to six-inch accuracy. Find out more at CyberCity3D.com.



About Cesium: Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without a plug-in. It uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics, and is cross-platform, cross-browser, and tuned for dynamic-data visualization. Cesium is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and is free for commercial and non-commercial use. Cesium is developed and supported by an open-source community, started by Analytical Graphics, Inc (AGI). Learn more at CesiumJS.org.



About the City of Fayetteville, NC: Fayetteville, NC, three-time winner of the All-America City Award from the National Civic League, is the county seat of Cumberland County and home to more than 200,000 residents. Fayetteville is home to Fort Bragg, one of the largest United States Army installations in the world. The city boasts one of the best retail markets in the country. The City is the only U.S. town named after the American Revolutionary hero, the Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette, which he visited. For more information, go tohttp://fayettevillenc.gov/.

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JavaScript for Geospatial applications: An Overview

By Muthukumar Kumar

JavaScript has formed a strong relationship with the Geospatial world (WebGIS, et.al) in a manner that is reminiscent of the relationship between Python and Desktop GIS. JavaScript is often regarded as more of a scripting language than a full-fledged object oriented language but I must admit it has got a much wider functionality than one might imagine and for the record, JavaScript is officially termed as Object-Scripting language (read: Mozilla’s JS page). If you are looking for an overview of programming languages used in GIS, have a look at my previous post.

While the capabilities of Desktop GIS and their applications are undisputed, there has been a steady growth in the number of WebGIS applications and Apps. Majority of such applications utilize one JavaScript library or the other. Depending on whether you just want to use JavaScript for developing a simple map for your website or visualize tweets in real-time, one of the many JavaScript libraries and tools might be of interest to you. Here’s an overview of JavaScript for Geospatial applications:

OpenLayers

OpenLayers has great documentation, a new version (3.0), lots of examples to get you started and the best thing of them all – Open source! Certainly my favorite JavaScript library and is one of the easiest ways to get a map on the web.

ESRI API for JavaScript

ESRI does it and does it well. Not for nothing, is ESRI considered as the GIS pioneer. Some of the functionality that you see with ESRI’s API is not that easily achievable with the Open source solutions especially if you have limited programming skills. However ESRI is not alone in the JavaScript for Geospatial arena and it looks like this is going to be one interesting competition.

CartoDB

CartoDB impressed us with their living cities visualization partnering with HERE and then they “wowed” us with the real-time geo-tagged twitter maps. Guess those two examples are enough to understand why CartoDB.js is a great library for geospatial applications. Here’s a presentation (Jan 2013) about using CartoDB to develop maps for the web.

MapBox

MapBox.js is another cool library for building interactive maps. FourSquare, Pinterest, National Geographic are some of the companies that utilize MapBox’s JavaScript libraries for their web maps.

D3

Data-Driven Documents or D3 is general purpose data visualization library. D3 is certainly a hot topic of discussion and development among geospatial professionals. Considering that D3 supports a new format called TopoJSON for topology data, this is a given I guess! Our geo-geek blog partners at digital-geography do most certainly love this. Here’s a blog post regarding mapping using D3.

Leaflet

Leaflet is a great tool for making mobile-friendly interactive maps and it extremely light-weight at 33 KB. Leaflet has a lot going for it and was one of the fundamental driving forces behind the recent redevelopment of OpenLayers 3.0.

Node.js & Node Postgres

Great JavaScript libraries for building a web based PostGIS application.

Open Weather Map API

Get detailed weather information using this free JavaScript API.

Cesium

Really cool JavaScript library for rendering interactive 3D (0r 2D) graphic visualizations without any plug-ins on the browser, requires WebGL though.

HERE Maps API

If you want to make use of the HERE’s awesome expertise with traffic information, routing and more.

StoryMap.js

The Open source alternative to ESRI’s Story map application.

And of course, Yahoo Maps API, Bing Maps API and Google Maps API. If you dont want to use the data from the big players, there is always OpenStreetMap.

Learning JavaScript
There are lots of JavaScript books, resources and tutorials available and to each one his/her own but you might want to have a look at OpenGeo’s resource for learing to use JavaScript for Geospatial applications aka programming WebGIS applications – OpenGeo’s JS page.

I am sure that I am missing a lot of really nice JavaScript libraries and APIs. It would be wonderful to have your input in this regard. After all, that’s what the comments section is for.

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CyberCity 3D Leverages Building Services to Stream 3D Buildings on Cesium

CyberCity 3D, Inc. ("CC3D”) announced today that it has signed a streaming 3D building services agreement with Analytical Graphics, Inc., (AGI) a provider of commercial software for the aerospace and geospatial communities.

CyberCity3D now provides streaming 3D building services in the Binary Gltf® format, which is designed for light-weight web transmission of 3D content. Released in Cesium 1.10, Binary Gltf groups 3D buildings together into tiles to reduce the number of network requests and WebGL draw calls. The result is blazing fast 3D streaming maps for all environments including mobile pads and smart phones. These services save time and money while communicating 3D maps for decision-making to the broadest possible markets.

"We are thrilled to be moving so quickly with the Cesium team. Streaming 3D maps with our joint technologies is truly a game-changer for cities worldwide seeking to make better decisions through mapping information," stated Kevin DeVito, CEO of CyberCity 3D, Inc.

CC3D is offering streaming 3D building and terrain services to both governmental and private planning and mapping sectors. CC3D has been creating high-resolution, interoperable 3D GIS city models for clients including Autodesk, Google and Esri for the past 8 years. It is the leader in 3D smart building content for most 3D mapping and visualization applications.

AGI’s Chief Operating Officer, Frank Linsalata praises, “CyberCity 3D provides exceptional 3D building content. We are very excited that they are utilizing the Cesium Building Server to stream rich 3D content to their customers.”

Above Image: Streaming 3D Map- MIT Campus with trees, ortho imagery & storm water catchment layers

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About Cesium

Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) is the incubator of the Cesium team who is the founder and primary contributor to the CesiumJS open source project. The Cesium team also builds off-the-shelf software products to enable the rapid dissemination of geospatial data products. For more information, email Email Contact.

About CyberCity 3D

CyberCity 3D is a global leader in the creation of the 3D built environment, producing smart and interoperable data sets for use in mapping and planning. For more information, email Email Contact.

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