iTowns V1

What is it?

iTowns is a web framework written in Javascript/WebGL for visualisation of 3D geographic data allowing precise measurements in 3D. Its first purpose was the visualisation of street view images and terrestrial lidar point cloud. It has then been extended to handle more data types.

See [http://itowns.github.io/] for more informations.

Supported data types

• Oriented images
• Panoramic images
• Point Clouds
• 3D textured models
• WFS Vector

The V1 of iTowns Open Source is the core of the original iTowns from IGN Matis lab. As such, it contains a subset of the original application features.

Features

• Load and project Oriented Images on mesh (cube or city model)
• Load and display Panoramic Images
• Load Depth Panoramic Image and render in 3D
• Load 2D multipolygons with height (building footprint) from WFS or local file and triangulate it to create building boxes. This mesh can then be use for texture projection.
• Navigate through Image Data using click and go functions
• Load and display Point Cloud from PLY files.
• Load and display 3D textured models (B3D, 3DS).
• Simple API interface.

Sample data

You can test iTowns with a provided sample data set, courtesy of IGN.

The sample data is here : https://github.com/iTowns/itowns-sample-data

It includes :

• 250 Oriented Images (50 Panoramics, 192 MB)
• 1 patch (500 * 500m) of 3D textured city models (BATI3D, 50 MB)
• Terrestrial PointCloud (20 Millions point, 400 MB)
• JSON of building footprint and DTM (500 kB)

Getting started

Instructions below will differ depending on whether you just want to run the demo locally, or start developping (and then run the demo in development mode).

Running the demo locally

To get a quick idea of what iTowns is, just type in what follows in the command line:

git clone -b gh-pages https://github.com/iTowns/itowns.git
git clone https://github.com/iTowns/itowns-sample-data.git
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

The first command just clones this repository. The second one clones the sample data repository and the third lauch a simple HTTP serveur on your machine on port 8000 (choose another available port if 8000 is already in use).

Then just point your web browser at http://localhost:8000/itowns-sample-data/ and enjoy!

Building iTowns

To build iTowns, make sure you have Node.js installed, clone the repository, then open a console and type (from the directory you cloned the iTowns repository into):

npm install
npm run build

This will produce an optimized, bundled itowns.js in the dist/ directory.

Note that if you already cloned the repository from the “Running the demo locally” instructions, you'll have to checkout the master branch (above instructions did checkout the gh-pages instead, which contains a prebuilt version of iTowns).

Run the demo in development mode

To run the demo in development mode, you need to clone the sample data repository next to the iTowns repository.

If you initially followed the “Running the demo locally” instructions, you're all setup; otherwise, run the following commands:

cd ..
git clone https//github.com/iTowns/itowns-sample-data.git
cd -

Then run:

npm start

and open http://localhost:8080/itowns-sample-data/ (note that the port is different from the “Running the demo locally” instructions)

Any change to a source file will automatically trigger a reload of the demo in the browser. The webpack-dev-server that is launched by the npm start command builds the project on-the-fly (and in-memory) and generates source-maps for easy debugging in your browser. Note however that the code you run in the browser is not directory the code from the source files, it has been processed by webpack.

To change the port the server listens on, pass additional -- --port PORT arguments, e.g.

npm start -- --port 8000

Roadmap items

The following tasks are currently worked on :

• Code simplification
• Documentation
• Offline examples
• Python code for data preparation

Meanwhile, iTowns Version 2 is also being developped.

Support

iTowns is an original work from IGN, MATIS research laboratory. It has been funded through various research programs involving the French National Research Agency, Cap Digital, UPMC, Mines ParisTec, CNRS, LCPC.

iTowns is currently maintained by IGN ( http://www.ign.fr ) and Oslandia ( http://www.oslandia.com )