Lessons Learnt Visualising Real-World Cities in 3D
summary
ViziCities is an open-source JavaScript/WebGL platform that actually renders real cities in the browser using three.js and proj4, and it proves the approach works by showing live London Underground trains and interactive buses. Practical constraints appear: the planet OSM dump tops ~300 GB, Overpass rate limits force throttling with throat.js, and rendering millions of buildings requires tiled loading, simplify-js polygon reduction, and web workers + transferable objects to keep the UI responsive. Build and test tooling uses grunt/gulp, Q, localForage and SlimerJS.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Start
- 6:31Lesson Data quality is a PITA
- 9:31Cities are huge
- 11:07Use third-party data APIs where possible
- 13:40Accurate height data is rarer than rocking-horse poo
- 17:57Lesson Don't lock up the browser
- 21:32De-couple the architecture
- 23:28Lesson 10 Large projects can be a nightmare to manage
- 26:43Lesson 11 Make sure you actually improve things
- 29:10Overal Don't sacrifice enjoyment in pursuit of perfection
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