Censational
3D Geo Data Visualisation
- SPA Design
- Three.js
- Leaflet
- D3
Censational is a project that explores the potential usage of 3D web technologies in the growing field of data visiualisation. It was completed in conjunction with my final dissertation for my degree. The application itself is a single page application that generated 2D and 3D cartographic representations of Irish Census data (provided by cso.ie)
The application includes four main datasets that a user can choose from. These datasets are then used to apply the data to three main types of 2d visualisations: a scatterplot, heatmap and cartograph. These visualisations were created using either Leaflet or D3.
A grayscale image of the 2D visualisations are then run through the geospatial translate library GDAL. GDAL then generates a binary file of numbers which are based off of the black/white level of a certain point in the image.
Using Three.js, a flat wireframe mesh is then created that loops through the numbers in the binary files to apply them to the mesh segments as height points. The final render shows a 3D topographic representaion of the 2D charts.