3D Geospatial Data Visualization in VR

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) to visualize data is increasingly common in various fields, from medical science to education. However, visualization of geospatial data in VR is still not handled well. GIS data comes in various formats and converting them to 3D can be challenging. The choice of a format capable of streaming large amounts of spatial data in the VR scene is crucial. However, the challenge lies in ensuring the reusability of the presented scenes with different GIS data. Most applications (including the 3D scene models) are created for a single use case and do not allow for simple interchangeability of presented data. This article proposes a reusable architecture of a general-purpose web service for processing and visualizing spatial data in VR using 3D Tiles as the chosen format. The goal of the architecture is to allow fast VR scene generation from GIS data. The critical aspect is the conversion of standard GIS format to 3D Tiles. Several conversion tools were tested and compared using publicly available point and polygon feature layers in order to choose which can be used in the proposed architecture.