Virtual China

Parts of the world will become virtualized as time and people arise to tackle them.  If you are working on any particular location and are willing to be listed here, please let us know!

National Data

• using the GTOPO30 data for China results in a very low-resolution elevation grid, unsuitable for even very high-elevation flyovers (VTBuilder image to right)
• reportedly, China accomplished 1:250,000 national DEM models in 1999
• also reported: "About the elevation data for China, I think you may be able to get it. The State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping of China had published 1:1,000,000 scale data for China. I can ask them if the data had published in USA."
• commercial data:
  • East View Geospatial page for China
  • Historically, ESRI sold a product Digital Map Database of China (previously called ArcChina?) which includes elevation contours as well as "cities and towns, hydrography, transportation, land cover, culture, and other natural features" all at very rough scale (1:1,000,000)
• Grids & Datums for the PRC (pdf, from May 2000 PE&RS)
• according to the document 'State of the Digital Earth Initiative' [.doc] [offline as of 2007]
  • "The Chinese hosted the 1st International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE) in the winter of 1999 and announced the commitment of significant funds to a Chinese Digital Earth."
• China Dimensions site at CIESIN has freely available vector data
  • has 1:1M boundaries for national, provincial, regional, and county levels
  • these use the PRC definition of "China" to include Tibet and Taiwan, not to mention Aksai-Chin and Arunāchal Pradesh
• Star Vision Ltd. sells national and local vector data
  • national: SVMap-China, example local set: SVMap-HongKong
  • They are created from published paper map, satellite image, map book, car GPS, etc.
  • Price are very reasonable, ranging from $500 up depending on the coverage and map scale. For example, SVMap-HK is about $5000, SVMap-Guangzhou (normal provincial city, 100 sq km) is about $5000
• Orthocoverage Downloads includes a free sample of good data (15m greyscale image, 15m elevation) for a small area in China

GeoScope (2010-2011)

• A software project by the Virtual Reality Laboratory of Wuhan University
• "3D geospatial data integration, management, visualization, analysis, and application"
• "unified 3D city models supporting multi-scale semantic representation of outdoor & indoor and aboveground & underground 3D objects"
• there is apparently no website for the project (at least with any English?), but it is mentioned in the blog entry GeoScope: A Full 3D GIS Platform for Virtual Reality and the academic article GeoScope: Full 3D geospatial information system case study (sadly, behind a pay wall for $35)
• The main goal has been to build Digital Wuhan City, with an area of 8494 km2:
  

Edushi (E都市, "E-metropolis")

• Edushi is a company with a series of websites with a Google-Maps-like 2D interface to beautifully rendered 3D (really 2.5D) city maps.
• As of January 2006, they had large parts of 上海 Shanghai, 杭州 Hangzhou, 温州 Wenzhou, 青岛 Qingdao, 深圳 Shenzen, 佛山 Foshan.  Checking in 2007, Foshan and Wenzhou appear to be no longer online.
• The renderings have the clean, idealized appearance of SimCity, but are clearly built on an extremely detailed and impressive GIS database.  They are the closest thing to virtual terrain publicly available for China.
• Each landmark including every large building links to photos and further information.
• There is very little English, so i can't determine much more about their data source or business model, but they do list a very large number of cooperating partners, so perhaps the modelling work is spread around a consortium.  It also appears that they have a public API (like Google Maps).

Cities

• Hangzhou
  • The city of Hangzhou (pop. 6 million) is located approximately two hours west of Shanghai, on the Xiantong river. It is famous for the mountain-backed West Lake, one of the classic landscapes of China.
  • subject of a urban planning study by Dr. Michael Flaxman and his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which utilized the VTP for visualization
  • overview presentation: Using Virtual Cities to Plan Real Cities: A Case Study (August 2002, PowerPoint, 4 MB)
  • target area: UTM Zone 51, WGS84, BT has extents (219000, 3338000), ( 20000, 20000)
  • SPOT image is 500m taller: (219000, 3337500), ( 20000, 20500), resampled to 2048x2048
  • There is also an Edushi site for Hangzhou
• Nanjing
  • Nanjing city in VRML-X3D [17de.com, offline as of 2004.09.08]
    • contact: Meng Yiqi, m17design@hotmail.com
    • they are working on Virtual Nanjing City and will make a VRML page for it
    • they are working in 3DS MAX, as part of a course on course on low-polygon modelling
    • yet undecided whether they will be able to share the source data
    • status 04.12.18: received another email from Yiqi. still unable to reliably access the site http://17de.com/nanjing/
  • Virtual Xiaoling Tomb of the Ming Dynasty, built with Blaxxun VRML platform [site unresponsive as of 2007]
• Huai'an, Jiangsu Province
  • VR Huaian / Hongzehu drainage (was at http://17de.com/huaian/)
  • "Total scene is split into 5 X 5 patches, Every patch is 30 X 30 Km area. Every patch is textured in 1024 X 1024 pixel, about 30m resolution.  Detail modeling is on water system and highway system, so you can fly over the whole area and walk on the main road and riverside."
  • 
• Xi'an, Shaanxi Province
  • the Xi'an Qujiang New District is a tourism-boosting project south of the main Xi'an city; what makes it interesting is that there is a standalone 3D visualization by 3DVRII of the new development
    
  • Xi'an page on Yahoo
  • Yalun Sun of the Shaanxi Province Highway Bureau, sunyalun@bigfoot.com
    • all of his work is under Arc/Info, and another GIS platform from Canada named TITAN
    • uses USGS DEM for elevation: "To make the road's layout and design based enough precise DEM model is one of our goals. We use 1:2000 "strip like" model in our work."
    • has very detailed attributes on many roads, using SQL to manage all the highway attributes
    • stores "about 800 data items related to the road - Length of distress road, Area of patching, Width of the left shoulder, Width of marginal strip, type of bridge deck paving, etc."
    • could export to SHP files
• Shanghai
  • RMIT urban futures laboratory did "a digital 3D masterplan and in association with Immersive Solutions, prepared a web-based interactive display, for the proposed waterfront development of Nanqiao (in Shanghai) for Urbis Pty Ltd."
    
  • There is also an Edushi site for Shanghai
  • project announced 2007-02-10 on Shanghai Daily: Digital map to provide 3D view of downtown
    • "BY the time the World Expo opens in 2010 [..] the city plans to create a digital, 3D map of Shanghai that can be easily searched online. The project will be similar to Google Earth, but will provide an even better look at the city's architecture, according to Shu Rong, a researcher with the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics."
• NanChang, JX province
  • home of the famous Teng-King Tower, built in 653; one user expressed interest in modelling it
• Beijing
  • contact: HuaJun Zhang, newcyber@mx.cei.gov.cn
  • there exists a very detailed model of the Forbidden City, first modelled in MultiGen and then later as many large 3DS MAX models, which are not yet conducive to realtime rendering
• Wuhan, Hubei Province
  • contact: tu1chao@sohu.com wants to model the terrain of Wuhan
• Huaibei, Anhui Province
  • contact: Jam Ch'in (sanshiqin@gmail.com) has worked on modelling Huaibei.  As of March 2006, he had this VTP screenshot to show:
    
    He says that he cannot distribute his elevation data (it is not allowed.)
• Zhenjiang
  • Jam Ch'in wrote in 2008: "Zhenjiang project created by our team. There is around 15*21 Km area modelled, including some buildings build by 3DMax studio."
    
• Great Wall
  • it would be interesting to apply procedural generation (parametric construction) to the wall