GeoVRML Example Content

This page contains a collection of links to a number of GeoVRML examples (1.0 and 1.1). These are provided as a showcase for the capabilities that GeoVRML offers, and also as working examples to help new content developers use GeoVRML. Note, in order to view any GeoVRML content, you must first download and install the GeoVRML Run-Time. If you have written content that you would like to have included on this page, then please announce this on the geovrml mailing list. For further information on GeoVRML 1.1, please refer to the GeoVRML 1.1 Home Page.

You can download a ZIP archive containing these examples from here.

Ryan's GeoVRML Page Ryan Koehnen Ryan Koehnen's Senior Project at the University of Minnesota involved work with GeoVRML. He has provided a number of examples of the scenes that he developed, including Wheeler Peak Wilderness Area in Northern New Mexico, the Napa Valley area in California, and St Paul in Minnesota.
Hong Kong Port Benjin This GeoVRML example is of a port in Hong Kong built with Leica-Helava DPW-770 data (View Image, View Map). The model includes imagery, elevation, buildings, roads, and water areas. The model was produced by Benjin of the Remote Sensing Department at the Institute Of Surveying and Mapping, Henan, China.
MapJunction 3D Greg Cockroft The MapJunction site includes 3D GeoVRML satellite terrain models of the Boston area, including a 1 ft resolution dataset from 1995 and a 1 m resolution dataset from 1991. The site also includes some plain VRML building models (historical and recent) for the Boston area.
Hawaii Bathymetric Surveys Mike McCann, MBARI Mike McCann of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) produced these GeoVRML models for multibeam surveys off of the Hawaiian islands. These are available by clicking on the appropriate parts of a map of the islands. The scenes were produced using the tsmApi utilities, which Mike extented to support a HUD feature and the ability to explicitly resolve higher detail by clicking over the area of interest.
tsmApi Terrain Example Martin Reddy, SRI International The open source tsmApi library provides routines to generate tiled multiresolution terrain models in GeoVRML format. The make_geovrml tool provides a command line utility to this functionality. This example is for a terrain model around the Camp Pendleton area in Southern California. There are six levels of detail, with the highest resolution going down to 30 m. The total dataset size is around 10 MB.
Martin's Trips Martin Reddy, SRI International This GeoVRML scene has a model of the earth which you can drag to rotate. Dotted on the surface of the planet are a number of pointers to places that I have travelled to recently, many with hyperlinks into my on-line photo album so you can see pictures of the places by just clicking on the red pointers. The GeoVRML for the pointers was generated automatically by the text2geovrml utility that is packaged with the tsmApi library.
Mars Salvador Bayarri, ESRI This model was output using the GeoVRML export capabilities of ESRI's 3D Analyst Extension for ArcView/ArcInfo 8.1 product (official release date Q1 2001). This combines coarse resolution image and elevation data for the planet Mars, using lat/long coordinates. ESRI's home page is at http://www.esri.com.
Squaw Valley, CA Salvador Bayarri, ESRI This model was also output using the GeoVRML export capabilities of ESRI's 3D Analyst Extension for ArcView/ArcInfo 8.1 product (official release date Q1 2001). This example is created by combining an ortho image (retouched to have a blue color) with a DEM of the squaw valley, near Lake Tahoe. Coordinates are UTM. ESRI's home page is at http://www.esri.com.
Mexico Boundaries and Features Matt Fadoul, Bashir Reasearch This GeoVRML scene was converted from an original ESRI Shape file by the Bashir Research ShapeViz tool. This particular example shows a number of layers for Mexico, including state boundaries, rivers, roads, lakes, and cities. The ShapeViz tool with GeoVRML export is freely available from http://www.my3d.com/ShapeViz.htm.
Georeferenced SRI Campus Model Aaron Heller, SRI International This example shows a 3-D model of the SRI International campus in Menlo Park, CA. All of the 152 buildings have been georeferenced to their actual location on the earth using GeoLocation nodes. These have been overlayed directly on a terrain model built using a GeoElevationGrid and 1m resolution USGS imagery.
Exaggerated Earth Elevations Martin Reddy, SRI International This example presents a model of the earth built using a GeoElevationGrid. The first three buttons let you change the vertical exaggeration used by the GeoElevationGrid, between x 1 (no exaggeration), x 50, and x 200. The bottom two buttons let you toggle the display of the texture map. There is a lo-res version and a hi-res version.
Floating Point Precision and GeoOrigin Martin Reddy, SRI International This example shows two versions of a temple to illustrate the requirement for greater than single-precision floating point support, and how the GeoOrigin node helps to get round this limitation in VRML97.
Querying A Geographic Location John Brecht, SRI International This example shows the use of the GeoTouchSensor in order to retrieve the geographic coordinate that the user is pointing to. The scene displays a model of the earth built using a GeoElevationGrid, it then displays a red sphere at the point on the earth where the user is pointing to with the mouse, and also displays the latitude, longitude, and elevation at that point as a text label.
Lat/Long based Animation Martin Reddy, SRI International In this example, a red sphere is animated between the lat/long coordinates for London, Paris, and New York. This is done with a GeoPositionInterpolator, displayed over a GeoElevationGrid. In addition, we display the Lat/Long coordinate of the sphere as a label above the sphere.
Streaming of Multiresolution Tiles Martin Reddy, SRI International This example illustrates the basic capability of the GeoLOD node to stream sections of a large terrain model over the web in a view-dependent fashion. A quad-tree based approach is adopted so that further detail can be loaded for the parts of the model that the user is closest to. This example uses colored tiles rather than actual terrain data in order to more clearly demonstrate how the GeoLOD node loads and unloads data.
On Demand Inlining Martin Reddy, SRI International This example, taken from the Recommended Practice document, uses the GeoInline node to include a file which just contains a green cube. Click on the up arrow to send a set_load TRUE event to the GeoInline node, and Click on the down arrow to send a set_load FALSE event. There is also an EAI interface that lets you inspect the contents of the scene graph.