Aug 29, 2016 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is considering start of a new work item for a Community Standard: 3D Tiles. The public is requested to comment on this work item proposal.

3D Tiles is a publicly available open specification for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets for visualization. To expand on existing 2D and 2.5D streaming of map tiles and terrain, 3D Tiles support 3D models such as buildings (exterior and interior), trees, point clouds, TIN terrain, and vector data use cases.

Bringing techniques from graphics research, the movie industry, and the game industry to 3D geospatial, 3D Tiles define a spatial data structure and a set of tile formats designed for 3D, and optimized for streaming and rendering. The initial tile formats are:

• Batched 3D Models – for buildings, terrain, massive models, etc.
• Instanced 3D Models – for trees, bolts, valves, etc.
• Point Clouds – for massive point clouds.
• Vector Data – for 3D points, polylines, and polygons, including extrusions.
• Composite – a tile of tiles to allow aggregation.

A document has been prepared by several OGC members that provides a justification to the OGC Technical Committee (TC) for consideration of 3D Tiles as a Community standard. This justification, along with the submitted candidate Community standard, will form the basis for TC review and vote to approve the start of the Community standard process for this standard.

The Justification Document is available at: https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/70040. The proposed Community Standard is available at: https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles/blob/master/README.md. For examples of 3D Tiles, you can view a showcase video at https://youtu.be/KoGc-XDWPDE.

Comments can be submitted to Email Contact by 18 September 2016

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.

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