GIS Data Environments

As an RND project at Spectr XR, I researched implementing environment generation based on open-source GIS data at runtime. This would allow clients of Spectr BIM to visualize their uploaded model anywhere in the world for no additional cost. This runtime feature uses overpass-api to download ways and nodes (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Glossary) to download the real-world's road network and building contours. From that and additional attributes stored on these nodes, it guesses what the building might look like.

This feature has been optimised so thoroughly that the only bottleneck comes from the download time. For standard cities the process except download takes up to three seconds. More complex locations may take up to six seconds.

For texturing and roofs, no perfect solution was found yet. Textures could technically be taken from satellite data, but this is either under a license or low quality, and since satellite data is not always perfectly top-down, this would also be too inaccurate.

Due to other pressing issues at Spectr XR, this feature had to be put on hold after this first version.