GIS and Remote Sensing

12. Geo-spatial simulation and visualization

3D visualization models have a variability of applications in geography and urban studies such as site location analysis, emergency facilities planning, design review, marketing, etc. They are usually used to simply visualize the built environment; there are early signs of them being used as 3D interfaces to more sophisticated recreation models.

In recent years, substantial advances have been made in the growth of intelligent 3D models of the built environment. Technology exists today that allows us to render visually stunning and richly detailed simulations of urban environments in a way that renders an ease of communication and understanding that is not currently present in many simulation models. These 3D models can be used as a user-friendly interface for querying the urban environment as a geographic information system, for hyper-linking Web-based information, for visualizing model results, and for accessing functional simulation models. The addition of a third dimension to our knowledge base of urban systems greatly enriches the simulation capacity of predictive models.