The options for browser-based geographic data visualisation have improved a lot in recent years, driven particularly by large firms open-sourcing their in house visualisation frameworks. Deck.gl is a framework that came out of Uber for this type of task. Combined with open source standards like GeoJSON and 3D Tiles, and performant hardware accelerated 3D rendering, it is possible to render surprisingly large datasets in real time in a web browser.

This presents an intesting opportunity to anyone interested in urban modelling and visualisation. The prior art in this space has been dominated by desktop GIS software, which is often expensive and has a steep learning curve.

In addition, there is an emerging body of engineering effort towards 'local first' web applications, which are designed to work well offline and synchronise data between devices, allowing (for example) collaborative editing.

This project is (so far) a very early experiment/tech demo to combine some of these emerging technologies. In the first months of 2025, I have been learning deck.gl, reading computational geometry textbooks, and experimenting with building a UI to edit street geometry and generate city blocks and buildings based on urban visualisation papers such as Vanegas et al. (2012).

The source code is viewable here.