Development of three dimensional digital tourism presentation system based on Google Earth API

Three-dimensional digital tourism presentation system (3D-DTPS) is a crucial part of digital tourism. As a relatively mature digital earth software and platform, Google Earth (GE) has been widely used in various fields include digital tourism. Especially the release of GE Plug-in and API makes it possible to build sophisticated 3D web map applications which are just like 3D-DTPS. “Ecological-cultural tourism circle in western Hubei Province” (ECTC-WH) is a regional development policy and planning, and building 3D-DTPS of ECTC-WH (3D-DTPS/ECTC-WH) is the basic informatization construction task. By taking 3D-DTPS/ECTC-WH as an example, this paper expounded the development and implementation of 3D digital map web applications based on GE API, which mainly include 3D scene modeling and main functions implementation, the former is realized by overlaying different professional geospatial data such as HD remote sensing images, thematic vector data, 3D models, tours data to GE and then exporting to KML files, the latter mainly include 3D scene loading, query and location and flight tour. And the result shows that building 3D-DTPS based on GE API is effective, because it can not only make full use of the advantages of GE resources and technologies, but also can easily integrate professional data and functions to build sophisticated 3D web map applications.