A Study on the Construction of the Unity 3D Engine Based on the WebGIS System for the Hydrological and Water Hazard Information Display

Abstract

As natural disasters are occurring more and more frequently, the need for a system that monitors the precipitation and hydrological information in real time and that predicts the potential occurrence of water hazard is growing. As disasters represent the natural phenomena occurring in a country's territory, they are closely linked with spatial data. In the case of the geographic information system (GIS), which utilizes an increasing amount of spatial data, the 3D WebGIS utilizing high-precision DEM and aviation images is fast becoming the norm thanks to the advancement in the related hardware and software, thereby enabling the users to perform multi-faceted and multi-dimensional analysis of diverse pieces of information fused with spatial data. The establishment of a hardware system with high specifications, however, is indispensable in terms of the operating environment because the 3D GIS is usually built upon a vast amount of collected data. To address such shortcoming, a toolkit was developed in this study using Unity 3D, which is frequently being used in mobile games and is capable of representing geographic data without any limitation. In addition, a system capable of mashing up water hazard data based on a given environment, and of providing services on the Web, was completed. As such, it has become feasible to fuse diverse hydrologic resource data based on 3D GIS information, thereby enabling real-time observation and disaster prediction.