A Novel Camera Control Approach for Planetary-Scale Mapping Utilizing Game Engine Technology

Three-dimensional geospatial data is the first step in understanding the real world digitally. Realistic city models are used in urban planning and enable various physical simulations. The geospatial platforms based on game engines provide high development scalability by using various internal or external libraries for 3D programs. This paper proposes a camera control method for a planetary-scale 3D map based on the Unity3D game engine. Unity3D game engine uses float for all datatypes, which results in floating point precision limitation (FPPL). Therefore, precise camera control is limited when building a planetary-scale map with this game engine. It can also distort the rendering of small, distant models due to FPPL. This paper proposes a camera control method suitable for a planetary-scale map and introduces an improved algorithm to achieve precise camera control and undistorted rendering, especially in FPPL environments.