VC Publisher: Make Your City Come to Life in 3D

Geo-web applications are a core component of Local Digital Twins, or digital twins of cities. VC Publisher is an authoring tool that makes it easy to create and manage these applications. 

Terrain models, oblique aerial images, orthophotos and CityGML data all can be easily converted in VC Publisher to provide a holistic 3D view of a city.

VC Publisher has a graphical editor for configuring web applications. With this editor users can control the layout and style of the application, available renderers (2D, 3D, oblique), layers, tools, and other functionalities. To address BIPED-specific needs, such as energy-related analysis of live data, additional functionalities will be implemented by integrating custom plugins.

VC Publisher provides high-performance processing of all kinds of geodata. Raw data and data from municipal REST services is converted into streaming data sets, which can be easily accessed and used by lightweight web applications. These converters cover the following data types:

• x3dm - 3D object calculation

• pointcloud - point cloud conversion

• qmesh - terrain conversion

• oblique - oblique aerial image calculation

• tms - Tiled Map Service (raster overlay)

VC Publisher

VC Publisher’s backend and graphical editor are meant to be used by administrators in charge of controlling the contents and behaviour of a web application. A user and project management system can be connected to an IAM system to control user rights and privileges.

An additional REST API is available for controlling a VC Publisher instance from external modules. The REST API is defined using OpenAPI 3.0.1 technology, which facilitates discovery and understanding the services capabilities without requiring access to the source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic. Depending on the user role, API enables access to almost all functionalities of VC Publisher.

Leveraging its 3D processing capabilities, the team at BIPED already used VC Publisher to prepare basic geospatial data to represent Aarhus’ physical environment in a Digital Twin. In the future, VC Publisher will process all static and dynamic data for browsing and analysis through front-end dashboards.