Streaming high-res, large-scale areas to a web-viewer

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Hi all,

I’m currently researching the possibility of using Speckle to stream large scale areas with high resolution buildings to a web-viewer. While the existing web-viewer is promising, it doesn’t currently match my teams needs. The most important feature I would want is the ability to stream only data within a certain bounding box to the viewer to reduce the polygon count. I’m considering adding this functionality to Speckle myself, but I would like pointers as to where to start, how to make it useful for the general community and whether to do this at all.

The alternative I’m looking at is building a transformer from Speckle to 3D Tiles. The tiles can then be streamed to the web-app when they come into view. However, it’s a shame to partially duplicate functionality from the existing viewer instead of incorporating the tiles functionality in the viewer itself.

I’d love to hear your input!

Best,
Nahuel

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Chunked Streaming

Great idea. This isn’t supported by how the viewer handles the Speckle data stream but is something we have seen used in other online 3d platforms.

The use cases seem to be two-fold:

  1. Data too large for browser memory ceiling - especially of note on mobile devices
  2. Focussed attention

Tiled data

Another interesting idea. Technically already possible with the SDKs in combination with the Speckle webhook support.

Bringing those tiles into the viewer would still potentially hit the same memory ceiling if you add too many, so handling a user experience that managed that would be a challenge - definitely a good hackathon idea.

I demoed a Chrome Extension that extended the Speckle frontend that shows some of the scaffolding to do something like this. I should dust off the cobwebs.