125 Million US Buildings in 3D

note - screenshot is of Cesiumjs not the new U.S. cityGML data

Open City Model is a project which has been working on creating cityGML data for every building in the United States. The first release of Open City Model is now live, with the 3D building data for 125 million buildings in the USA.

You can grab the open cityGML data for the United States on the project's GitHub page. On Open City Model the U.S. 3D building date is available in two formats, cityGML and cityJSON. The data for each state is available in separate folders. The files for each state are further divided into each county.

If you want to use the data then check out the Open City Model GitHub page for a list of software that supports the format. CesiumJS being perhaps the best known of these. If you want to know what cityGML looks like in action then you should check out Finland's Helsinki 3D which uses cityGML with CesiumJS. The Open City Model GitHub page links to a number of other examples of 3D maps using cityGML.

Helsinki in 3D

The 3D Model of Helsinki is about to be updated with new imagery. Currently the city's 3D map is based on satellite imagery from 2015. Over the summer of 2017 an airplane captured 50,000 aerial photographs of the city. Now ten dedicated computers have turned those 50,000 aerial photographs into a new and improved photo realistic 3D model of the city.

The CityGML data of the city's 3D model will be released as open data early in 2019. Currently the 3D Helsinki map is used by Helsinki's urban planners. For example the city is currently running a pilot project to simulate wind speed and direction. This could then be used to model what wind circumstances would be generated by planned new buildings. In the future the city also wants the public to be able to preview planned new buildings in context on 3D Helsinki before they are even built.

You can learn more about the coming improvements to 3D Helsinki, how the map is currently used and the city's future plans for the map at The Best 3D Model in the World Improves with Age.