Where to start...

After following 3D blogs such as GeoPlanit and Synthicity for a while and knowing how much it has helped me, I decided to try and put my own 3D thoughts to paper...sort of.   

So that brings me to the title of this post: Where to start?

After some consideration, I decided that the best place to start is at my latest 3D adventure in CityEngine. I've been playing around a lot with ESRI's CityEngine software for a while now. In terms of projects, the opportunities to use CityEngine has been limited so far at work. But I am a firm believer that 3D is the way to go in terms of understanding and displaying data in the future! I also believe that the best way to learn about something is to play around with it and experiment for yourself...

My latest adventure with CityEngine consisted of creating a web scene that displays world landmarks with rich attributes.

This was one of very few CityEngine projects I've worked on where Procedural rules were not used at all! The model consisted entirely of Trimble 3D models. I downloaded famous world landmarks such as the London Eye, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. I also downloaded a model of the Earth, which served as a "3D-Basemap".

Paris

New York

London

Open each model with SketchUp and export it to a Collada (.dae) file somewhere in the CityEngine project (preferably the Asset folder). In CityEngine simply drag the Collada file into the scene. Then use the "Move Tool" to correctly align the models.

The landmarks also included The Great Pyramid of Giza; the Bruj Khalifa; Christ the Redeemer statue; Tokyo Tower; and the Sydney Harbour. Lastly I included two South African landmarks (probably due to some patriotic bias) namely the Green Point stadium in Cape Town and the Hillbrow Tower in Johannesburg.

The initial idea was to create an image attribute for each of the landmarks; thereby displaying a picture when clicked in the final web scene. This can be achieved quite easily.
While a feature is selected, open the Inspector window to view its attributes. Right-click on one of the attributes and choose Add Object Attribute to create a new attribute.

 When the "Create Attribute" window appears, choose a name and make sure that the Type is set to string (STR). After the attribute has been created, populate it with an i-frame. For example:

<iframe height="405" width= "600" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02423/london_2423609b.jpg" ></iframe>

This example below displays the iframe above:

I created image attributes for each landmark.

I was surprised at how easy it was to add iframe attributes, and not being from a programming background I started to wonder what else I could stuff into an iframe...

I then started adding still webcam images for Cape Town, Johannesburg and Paris. So when you click on one of these landmarks, a live webcam image will be displayed. Such as the example below (note the date stamp):


As it goes with these type of  "experiments", after you succeed with one thing; you keep on trying to add more and more. So it came to be that my mind started to wonder towards live video streaming. After a quick web search I found two sites (LIVESTREAM and USTREAM) that actually provide embedded URLs for live video streaming.

Using these sites, I created additional iframes for London, New York, Rio, Tokyo and Sydney. When one of these landmarks is selected in the web scene, a live video of that city appears in the attributes tab.

You can view the full web scene here.