Support for Visualisation and Animation in a Scalable 3d Gis Environment – Motivation, Concepts and Implementation

The establishment and visualisation of large, reality-based 3D landscape and city models has received significant attention over the last few years – both in the scientific and the commercial community. Recent progress in 3D data capturing and web-based visualisation technologies are opening up new possibilities for a wide-spread use of 3D landscape models as a basis for new and exciting information and entertainment services. However, with the rapidly increasing size and complexity of the 3D models being acquired, a pressing need for suitable data management solutions has become apparent. This paper outlines why 3D GIS technologies are a key factor in establishing and maintaining large-scale, reality-based 3D geoinformation services. It also discusses specific features which should be provided by such 3D GIS in order to support the efficient visualisation and animation of realitybased landscape and city models. The aspects of managing reality-based 3D models within a 3D GIS environment are being investigated as part of the DILAS (Digital Landscape Server) project. DILAS is a fully DBMS-supported framework – and now a commercial product line – combining object-relational and XML technologies for the integrated management of very large 3D landscape and city models. The system provides a comprehensive support for colour, transparency, textures as well as animations and view control. This support for reality-based 3D models within a 3D GIS environment enables the automated generation of webbased 3D scenes with user-defined contents and appearance. The paper concludes with the presentation of pilot projects from application areas which will largely benefit from the functionality presented above.