Image-based strategies for interactive visualisation of complex 3D geovirtual environments on lightweight devices

In this article, we present strategies for service-oriented, standards and image-based 3D geovisualisation that have the potential to provide interactive visualisation of complex 3D geovirtual environments (3DGeoVE) on lightweight devices. In our approach, interactive geovisualisation clients retrieve sets of 2D images of projective views of 3DGeoVEs generated by a 3D rendering service. As the key advantage of the image-based approach, the complexity that a client is exposed for displaying a visual representation is reduced to a constant factor primarily depending on the image resolution. To provide users with a high degree of interactivity, we propose strategies that are based on additional service-side functionality and on exploiting multiple layers of information encoded into the images for the local reconstruction of visual representations of the remote 3DGeoVE. The use of service-orientation and standards facilitates designing distributed 3D geovisualisation systems that are open, interoperable and can easily be adapted to changing requirements. We demonstrate the validity of the proposed strategies by presenting proof-of-concept implementations of several image-based 3D clients for the case of virtual 3D city models.