NYC Building Perimeters

26 Sep 2014

I love NYC and WebGL. So I married the two by rendering NYC building perimeters with ThreeJS using NYC Open Data.

Starting with NYC:

We can zoom into a neighborhood:

Batches were broken up by neighborhood.

See it for yourself.

Three takeaways I didn’t foresee:

1. The heavy downloads needed to get to all the 3D json files to the browser (it’s even more than I had feared).
2. The large amounts of RAM needed to render the models (no fancy LOD given the zoom levels).
3. The poor garbage collection when toggling between neighborhoods exacerbated 2.

See more technical details on the github page.

Check out the release of ViziCities, an impressive rendering of cities. Check out NYC.