An OGC 3D tiling technique based user-interactive platform for digital twins in a virtual reality environment

Abstract

There has been an ever increasing focus on the development of smart cities, both by big corporate in the field of Information Communication and Technology as well as respective governments responsible for these cities worldwide. This in combination with the influx of easily accessible data owing to cheaper and efficient sensors has risen to the concept of digital twinning of urban spaces and cities.

Urban digital twins require the city to be represented in 3-dimensional digitally, these datasets are oftentimes too large to be provided on as-is basis for most platforms. To tackle this problem of large 3D datasets, the OGC 3D tiling specifications were formed and accepted in 2019.

This thesis attempts to develop a neighbourhood designing platform which would enable users to design neighbourhoods in 3D while being able to experience the design in an immersive manner by utilizing virtual reality’s capability to observe 3D assets in scales which are not possible using a physical model or a 2 dimensional neighbourhood plan, employing the OGC 3D tiling technique to understand the extent to which a combination of existing 3D datasets can be made with a user-interactive neighbourhood designing platform in a VR environment.

The results of the study reveal that using our methodology, it is possible to combine existing 3D datasets with user made neighbourhood design with their own 3D assets of any level of detail and furthermore, it is possible to utilize instanced tiling format to disseminate the neighbourhood design as a standard 3D tiled design.