More and more cities are recognizing the tremendous benefits that a digital twin provides to its planners, private architects and engineers striving for compliance with city ordinances and by-laws, and for communicating with the public. I remember several years ago when the Prime Minister of Singapore in his annual National Day address included a 3D visualization of what the proposed Marina Bay towers would look like – perhaps the first time 3D visualization has been used to inform citizens on a national scale. At the Year in Infrastructure 2018 in London, Bentley announced the acquisition of Agency9, a Swedish company that provides web and mobile solutions for 3D visualization of geographic information and maps for collaboration and communication with its product CityPlanner (now OpenPlanner). With this acquistion, Bentley augments its competitive positioning relative to CityZenith (SmartWorldPro), ESRI (CityEngine), and Autodesk (Infraworks) and open source projects such as mago3D in offering a 3D visualization and analytics platform for the massive data sources required for cities including underground infrastructure.
The requirements of a comprehensive platform for city visualization and analysis for planners, architects and engineers, and the public are the ability to support OGC (KML, CityGML and others), BuildingSmart (IFC), defacto (Shape, DWG, DGN, Revit and others) and other standards such as GeoJSON making it possible to integrate GIS, CAD, and BIM (vertical and horizontal) data, content creating and editing tools, for example, to allow buildings to be extruded from footprints and rooves and facades customized, support for open data sources such as OpenStreetMap, ability to integrate satellite, aerial and ground photo imagery and LiDAR point clouds, support for both above- and below-ground infrastructure, gaming engine support (such as Unity or Unreal Engine) for interactive 3D visualization, cloud processing for managing, processing and querying massive amounts of data, web and mobile access, and APIs for analytics.
From a technical perspective the acquisition made a lot sense because Bentley’s ContextCapture (from the acquisition of Acute3D several years ago), which creates 3D meshes for both inside and outside buildings from aerial and ground photo images and LiDAR point clouds, has been used by Agency9 for many years as the basis for its visualization capabilities.
The West Link (Swedish: Västlänken) is a railway tunnel under construction under central Gothenburg. As an example of its support for underground infrastructure the City of Gothenburg used CityPlanner to publish a 3D visualization of the planned tunnel going below the entire city which showed stations with points of interest with images in a slideshow. During the first 24 hours that the project was published on its web site, it had over 10,000 unique visitors.
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