GIS and Virtual Reality

Mark Altaweel, Republished from GIS Lounge

Virtual reality (VR) has been integrated with GIS for some time, with academic and industry development ongoing since the 1990s. What is different now is data integration and powerful platforms no longer require specialized workstations or high-performance computing. From Esri’s CityEngine to more specialized software such as GeoScope, VR, or what has been called VRGIS, has now moved into area such as utility in Big Data applications, VR within mobile devices, and allowing users to more easily create sophisticated VR visualizations without programming.1

Using Virtual Reality and GIS in Urban Planning

One area of focus is in creating VR applications that provide realistic visualizations of traffic data, where its utility for traffic management is noted. The integration of real-time data and VR allows traffic management to more easily look at varied layers of transport, while also gaining ability to forecast patterns based on historical or expected patterns. Applying it within web technologies also allows easier sharing of data, where managers and those using transport can readily access needed data.2 Applications such as XEarth have incorporated 3D building model data, residents information, real-time and historical traffic data into their platform, allowing for a powerful understanding of city data where everything from current traffic patterns to up-to-date residential information, where the data are applied within a human-computer interaction framework.3 Applications with complex data demand have become a major challenge for VRGIS, particularly as these application have incorporated spatial query functions so that desired more quickly process complex data and not just simply look at high volume data. Such approaches allow faster processing of data, allowing for visual and query information to appear more quickly even in more typical desktop environments. In effect, data has become complex in structure and not just in volume, where VR platforms are particularly well made for visualizing such complex information in their appropriate dimensions.4

VRGIS and Teaching

While many VRGIS platforms and applications have focused on urban data, other applications of VRGIS have been in the area of education, including in the teaching of geography,