Data-Driven Compute Overlays for Interactive Geographic Simulation and Visualization

Keywords

3D geographic visualization, geographic simulation, WebGPU

Abstract

We present interactive data-driven compute overlays for native and web-based 3D geographic map applications based on WebGPU. Our data-driven overlays are generated in a multi-step compute workfow from multiple data sources on the GPU. We demonstrate their potential by showing results from snow cover and avalanche simulations, where simulation parameters can be adjusted interac- tively and results are visualized instantly. Benchmarks show that our approach can compute large-scale avalanche simulations in mil- liseconds to seconds, depending on the size of the terrain and the simulation parameters, which is multiple orders of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art Python implementation.