By Aaron An
The City of Wyndham, located in the western suburbs of metropolitan Melbourne, is committed to driving urban innovation to improve cities, working with the sector, businesses, universities and city leaders to solve the problems facing cities.
The Smart Cities and Suburbs Program aims to support projects that use innovative technology-based approaches to improve the liveability of cities and their suburbs. Wyndham City Council was awarded a grant from the Australian Government to use 'Holographic Computing to Decode Our Cities'.
Following the successful deployment of WynLens late last year, this complex project using relatively unexplored greenfield technology involves streaming three-dimensional city models and real-time data layers for presentation in augmented reality environments such as those offered by Microsoft HoloLens. The newly built platform is called CityLens because the holographic solution is designed to handle streamed three-dimensional data not only from Wyndham, but from anywhere in Australia.
Each step has been an adventure into the unknown, requiring agile thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit, and the project team is pleased to have achieved a number of milestones over the past six weeks, namely
The map background in CityLens uses cached OpenStreetMap tiles, which are then streamed from an Amazon cloud host.
Completed the creation of a single city model by merging a city model created from building footprint extrusions and the CBD model captured from drone footage.
To more easily consume the city models on the HoloLens device, the project team needed to convert the three-dimensional city models from traditional formats such as obj and KML to Cesium 3D tiles, a process built using FME Workflows to break larger models into more manageable blocks.
The project team then developed code to render the Cesium 3D tiles on the HoloLens device. This provides a streamable 3D format that pushes much of the computational complexity back to a server, allowing the application to display large 3D models across Australia on a mobile AR headset.
The next phase of the CityLens project will be incredibly exciting - the two key milestones currently being researched and implemented are
Merging the city models with proposed development layers to create a three-dimensional vision of our future cities.
Pulling in live Internet of Things (IoT) data via API endpoints for display on the HoloLens device.
The project team is currently in the product and application development phase. As part of this work, we are working to understand how CityLens can be rolled out across the local government sector and with other partners such as universities and planning and utilities authorities.