Cities constantly evolve, with the appearance of new neighborhoods and the disappearance of old buildings. Information about cities are nowadays stored as static data inside huge storages where it is difficult and slow to retrieve particular information. Moreover, different data sources about cities are not aggregated since they are provided by both public websites on the Internet and by public sectors of the city.
A visualization can help supporting any decision that involves city evolution, especially in the contest of what is called a Smart City. No such service exists that provides a unique environment in which the user can both visualize a city and interact with its elements. The only technologies available are either not exhaustive or too complex to use. For example, it is possible to find technologies online that are limited to provide a 3D--visualization without any kind of interaction between the map and the user.
Smart-IVC provides an interactive 3D-visualization model of cities, integrating heterogeneous data, and supporting complex visual queries. Smart-IVC is an application accessible by everyone (since it is both user-friendly and publicly available) and that aims to enhance the city visualization, getting closer to the user needs.
If you just want to try and play with Smart-IVC, you can find it here
If you have more time, you can run it on your machine using the following instructions.
Beware!! Since the program needs to load all the information about the city, to complete these steps, it may take a while (~24 hours)
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The user needs to have Java and MySql installed. Once the latter is installed, set a username and a password (we will refer to them as USERNAME_DB and PASSWORD_DB later).
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Create an empty database and give a name to it (we will refer to it as NAMEOFDATABASE later)
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Generate a Google Maps Key on https://console.developers.google.com (we will refer to it as GOOGLEKEY later)
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Download this repository as a zip file
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Unzip the folder
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Execute the following commands to install Cesium:
cd Smart-IVC
- mkdir src/main/resources/static/Cesium
- npm install cesium
- mv node_modules/cesium/Build src/main/resources/static/Cesium/Build- Now execute the following commands to run the application Server:
cd Smart-IVC
mvn clean install
cd target
java -jar demo-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar --DBPASSWORD="PASSWORD_DB" --GoogleMapsKey="GOOGLEKEY" --DBUSERNAME="USERNAME_DB" --DBURL="jdbc:mysql:https://localhost:3306/NAMEOFDATABASE"After the last command listed has been executed, the server will start. Be sure that everything works on the terminal, without any output error. Now open your favourite browser and go to localhost:8080 (equivalent to 127.0.0.1:8080).
You can now use the application to visulize and interact with the city.
- Andrea Vicari
Created during the Spring Semester 2017 as a Bachelor Project @Università della Svizzera Italiana