Mapping Your LinkedIn Connections with 3D Cities

Cube Cities can map your contacts on LinkedIn to the floors in the 3D buildings on Google Earth. With the LinkedIn developer tools its possible to connect your contacts to floors and reorganize how you see your LinkedIn network, especially in dense urban areas. It's even possible to map the precise area of a floor occupied by your contact if the space is known. Watch the video below for a look at this integration and contact us for more information.

3D Manhattan on Cesium using the iPhone 6 Plus

The latest version of iOS introduces support for the WebGL standard. This enables the Cesium mapping software to work on iPad and iPhone, without any app, plugin or special settings. This exciting development means that Cube Cities can now visualize any building or floor-level data directly onto iOS devices in the browser without any platform compatibility issues. The same user experience from desktop to mobile browser is now possible thanks to this significant leap forward for 3D virtual world software in the consumer market.

What's even better is Apple's latest iPhone introduces the new A8 chip and M8 motion coprocessor. This hardware makes a big difference with our Cesium pages, resulting in the smoothest virtual world application we've ever experienced on a mobile device using our building data. Below is a screenshot of Lower Manhattan in 3D using Cesium on the iPhone 6 Plus. Buildings are colorized in the traditional Sim City usage pattern. Contact us for a demonstration.

Cube Cities Multigeometry Building Data in Lower Manhattan

Cube Cities on Cesium @ FOSS4G 2014

We've been working with the Cesium 3D mapping software to visualize our building data. Cesium is exciting because its an open-source virtual globe that does not require a plugin to work in the web browser. Cesium has a very rich set of functionality and promises to deliver amazing city and building search interfaces for Cube Cities in the future.

This video clip from a Cesium presentation by Patrick Cozzi, founder of Cesium, points out our development efforts at the FOSS4G 2014 conference this week. A link to the full presentation will appear when posted.

The images below are Cesium screenshots showing our Chicago building data visualized by usage: commercial, residential, other.

Chicago Multigeometry Buildings on ESRI Maps in Cesium

Chicago Multigeometry by Usage on a Stamen Toner map.

Densification of the Chicago Loop from 1870 to Present

Here's a quick floor-by-floor visualization of the growth of Chicago's commercial core since 1870. See the video below for the full growth animation.

Chicago Loop 1960

Chicago Loop 1980

This video shows buildings emerging as the decades pass and shows only buildings that currently exist today.



High resolution, fullscreen link

Floor-indexing San Francisco: Cube Cities API

Cube Cities now offers API access to our database of floor information for commercial and residential buildings downtown San Francisco. Our database contains over 20 attributes for every building, including floor-specific geospatial data. 

One key application for the Cube Cities API is enabling customer mapping of their internal private data sources such as tenant information. Another is to visualize floor-level data that regularly changes such as energy and water consumption. 

The Cube Cities API provides authenticated access to our dataset through a simple REST API. Contact us for pricing and license terms.

The imagery below illustrates Cube Cities floor data relative to Google's autogenerated 3D imagery, which now provides a complete virtual representation of urban San Francisco. 

One Rincon Hill - South Tower

Transamerica Pyramid

Four Embarcadero Center

Millenium Tower 

345 California Center

555 California Street

Cesium: The Future of Virtual Globes

Cesium is a free, open-source virtual globe platform for web browsers that uses WebGL to create sophisticated 3D maps without a plugin. Cesium uses a geospatial data schema called CZML that can draw building models, lines and polygons overtop of base maps. 

Cube Cities building data such as floors, outlines, internal building cores and multigeometry shapes can be drawn and distributed using Cesium. Using the Cesium platform Cube Cities building data can now be seen with base map data from Bing Maps, ESRI, OpenStreet Maps and Stamen Design.

Learn more about Cesium here.

Cube Cities building geometry in Cesium with the Stamen Toner base map

The video below is an example of a Cube Cities multigeometry building model (500 West Madison Street in Chicago's West Loop) drawn in Cesium with a cycled series of open source base maps.



Fullscreen, high resolution link