Online 3D Terrain Visualization: A Comparison of Three Different GIS Software

Abstract

In recent times, the online 3D terrain visualization has created much interest in many applications such as land information system, military, environmental, tourism and mapping science. Many systems such as CityGML, Terraserver, Google Earth and Spaceye3D have successfully adopted this technology in their system for different applications. The aim of this paper is to compare the effectiveness of developing online 3D terrain visualization by using three popular GIS Software; R2V, Arc View 3.2 and Arc GIS 9.2. In this paper, we implement the system based on the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) for the terrain data and then overlay with satellite image. Finally, the effectiveness of online 3D terrain rendering in terms of terrain visualization quality, file size, and loading time are made to compare the quality of the systems. The results help the developers on finding the right software to be used for their online 3D terrain visualization.

Implementation of GIS-based Smart Community Information System and concepts of Digital Twin in the field of urban planning in Uzbekistan

“…These kind of platforms have made creating, interpreting, and mapping locational data easier and more intuitive, enabling people from all walks of life to create their own datasets and maps online [9]. In order to design the online 3D terrain visualization overlaid with satellite image data by using GIS software, there are some considerations that we need to be aware about that the quality of the visualization depends on the GIS software used [10,11].…”