This post is quiet interesting to me, as I read osmbuildings problems at twitter.
IMHO this can be a a huge step forward and as such it’s for a long time on the general 3D at OSM roadmap. This would change that mappers aren’t no more just tagging for personal renderings, but for a public available visualisation, that they can consume via various platforms. To get slowly to a solution, I asked the KDE Marble globe, if they might be interested in adding real 3D objects…
If we talking about** a new open service**, IMHO we need to make clear, that it needs to be modular and open in every step. But (IMHO) each step would need still a lot of time:
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infrastructure - you would need clusters and software that scales well
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storage backend - I’m not sure if PostGIS or any other current ready to use software could deal with the amount of data,
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transport protocol - starting from scratch? Beside opensim/Second life I don’t know any ready to use 3D streaming service. Or using enriched content on the back of WFS? Difficult to find a solution, that works for destop and embedded clients…
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data format - 3D has IMHO a 3D format hell all with pros and cons. Or developing something new?
opening OSM-3D services:
I don’t know anything about the concerns of the Heidelberg staff. Beside the social aspect, that I don’t want to blame anybody by reinventing a very similar solution, I think they already got a solution that works:
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infrastructure - is already there, even if centralized, they might get deployed at a donated cluster (user:vvvooovvv told something at the 2. 3D workshop)
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storage backend - seems to work at least ok
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transport protocol - Was used to demo/promote the W3DS which they publish as draft to OGC. (I can’t tell anything about it, as I didn’t read the specs)
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data format - They support a variety of open formats as VRML and Collada
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features - they already process SRTM terrain data and embed detailed buildings of OpenBuildingsModels (IMHO very essential aspects, to have a good user experience and to attract artists to contribute using their traditional 3D tools)