Introduction:

The GESO (Google Earth Sustainable Outlook) project visualises the results of the the NL later project in Google Earth (GE). The satelite images of GE are a nice reference for both the current as the projected land use and GE has many navigation functions, e.g. to fly over the country at different view heights.

The project is a cooperation of the PBL (Netherland Environmental Asssessment Agency), the WUR and Object Vision.

Results:

Click here for results of the GESO project.

Examples:

The current land use projection makes use of 3dShapes, a database with 3d topographical objects, classified to the LUMOS functional land use classes, see figure 1:

figure 1, 3dShapes used to visualise current land use

For the projected land use, different techniques are developed and evaluated:

• 2d polygons (small scale), see figure 2
• 2d iconographic, see figure 3
• 3d icons (large scale) see figure 4

figure 2, 2d polygons to visualise changes in current land use at a small scale

figure 3, 2d iconographic projection to visualise changes in current land use at a medium scale

figure 4, 3d icons to visualise changes in current land use at a large scale

Current and future land use projections can also be combined in one view.

KeyWords:

• 3d Visualisation of current and future land use
• Whole of the Netherlands
• Google Earth satelite images and navigation functions
• Functional classification of land use types based on LUMOS classification
• Spatial indexstructure to download and visualise only relevant information

Period:

The GESO project started at the end of 2007 and finished in the summer of 2008.