OGC Membership approves new version of 3D streaming Community Standard, I3S

I3S enables the streaming and storage of arbitrarily large amounts of 3D geographic data. An I3S dataset, referred to as a Scene Layer, can consist of millions of discrete 3D objects with attributes, integrated surface meshes, symbolized points, or billions of point cloud data covering vast geographic areas. Designed for performance and scalability, a scene layer enables the efficient encoding and transmission of various types of geospatial content for an interactive visualization experience on web browsers, mobile, and desktop apps for both offline and online access. A Scene Layer can be accessed in the form of a web service or Scene Layer Package (SLPK) – a file-based exchange format.

I3S is web and cloud friendly and is rooted in modern standards and technological advancements in the areas of 3D graphics, data structuring, and mesh and texture compression. I3S empowers city and local governments, content providers, and GIS professionals to easily share scene layers. Such scene layers can consist of terabytes of nation-wide point cloud coverage, city- and site-scale 3D mesh data collected at frequent intervals, 3D planning scenarios fusing both ‘as built’ and modeled information, and more. The increased accessibility and ease of consumption of 3D geospatial content by both domain experts as well as casual users is being rapidly accelerated by standards such as I3S.