Online 3D Terrain Visualization: A Comparison of Three Different GIS Software

In recent times, the online 3D terrain visualization has created much interest in many applications such as land information system, military, environmental, tourism and mapping science. Many systems such as CityGML, Terraserver, Google Earth and Spaceye3D have successfully adopted this technology in their system for different applications. The aim of this paper is to compare the effectiveness of developing online 3D terrain visualization by using three popular GIS software; R2V, Arc View 3.2 and Arc GIS 9.2. In this paper, we implement the system based on the digital elevation model (DEM) and triangulated irregular network (TIN) for the terrain data and then overlay with satellite image. Finally, the effectiveness of online 3D terrain rendering in terms of terrain visualization quality, file size, and loading time are made to compare the quality of the systems. The results help the developers on finding the right software to be used for their online 3D terrain visualization.