
Show HN: ViziCities 0.3 – Framework for geospatial visualisation in the browser - robhawkes
https://github.com/UDST/vizicities
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robhawkes
I'm Robin, the creator of ViziCities. Feel free to ask me any questions about
the 3D geospatial framework, UrbanSim or anything else :)

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semi-extrinsic
Why didn't you call it GeoCities?

All right, I'll get my coat.

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robhawkes
Haha! I'm actually annoyed at myself for not thinking of that sooner ;)

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jxm262
As someone recently new to Geo visualization (and data viz in general), I have
to say this project looks awesome! Kudos for all the hard work put into this

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robhawkes
Thank you, glad you like it! :)

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toocute2care
Hey Rob,

Congrats on the new release! ViziCities is one of the top geospatial
frameworks out there and very excited to see it continuously improving.

Your "Lessons Learnt" development post on mozilla a couple years back was
absolutely invaluable.

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robhawkes
Thank you! I'm glad that you found the development post on MozHacks useful – I
should really do a 2016 updated version...

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elcapitan
This looks great, congrats!

It's a bit slow on my machine (the linked demos), is that a general issue due
to 3d rendering capabilities, or is just the data source for the demos slow?

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robhawkes
Thank you!

The performance could be a bit of both I imagine – a computer with a weak GPU
or a visualisation at sufficiently large resolution will strain the framerate,
especially the higher quality demos (eg. "All The Things").

The data sources are remote and so you may notice tiles and data taking a
little while to load before popping into view. This is something I'm looking
to improve with more sophisticated networking and Web Workers for background
processing without locking up the browser.

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elcapitan
It is - just tried it out on my work machine, a little faster now (with much
better GPU).

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krapht
So, how does this compares to Cesium.js and Worldwind?

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robhawkes
I've no experience of Worldwind but Cesium and ViziCities both use WebGL and
both display the same kind of data. Cesium is built around the concept of a
round, globe-like representation of the world whereas ViziCities is a flat
representation of the world. ViziCities is arguably simpler to use and simpler
in functionality, whereas Cesium is built with scientific and incredibly
accurate scientific data visualisation in mind (eg. satellite positioning).

