Visualisation Using Game Engines

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Computer Aided Facility Management-Systems (CAFM) are currently undergoing the transition to storing and processing real 3D geospatial data. Applications for this type of data are, among others, location based services, navigation systems and the planning of large-scale construction projects. For presentation purposes and especially when working in the field, powerful visualisation systems are needed that are also capable of running on mobile devices like notebooks, personal digital assistants (PDA) or even cell phones. In such application areas, the free movement of the viewer’s position and the interaction with the data are of great importance. Real-time visualisation of 3D geospatial data is already well established and also commercially successful in the entertainment industry, namely in the market of 3D video games. The development of software in this field is very cost-intensive, so that the packages are often used for several game products and are therefore universally applicable to a certain extend. These so-called game engines include not only visualisation functionality, but also offer physics, sound, network, artificial intelligence and graphical user interfaces to handle user inand output. As certain portions or sometimes even the whole engine are released as open source software, these engines can be extended to build more serious applications at very little costs. The paper shows how these game engines can be used to create interactive 3D applications that present texture-mapped geospatial data. The integration of 3D data into such systems is discussed. Functionality like thematic queries can be implemented by extending the internal data structures and by modification of the game’s accompanying dynamic link libraries.