OGC Seeks Public Comment on v1.1 of 3D Tiles Community Standard

3D Tiles enables sharing, visualizing, fusing, and interacting with massive heterogenous 3D geospatial content across desktop, web, mobile, and metaverse applications.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles Community Standard, which is used for sharing, visualizing, fusing, and interacting with massive heterogenous 3D geospatial content across desktop, web, mobile – and now metaverse – applications. Comments are due by September 23, 2022.

Previously referred to as “3D Tiles Next,” Version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles Community Standard is designed for streaming high-resolution, semantically-rich 3D geospatial data to the metaverse. 3D Tiles 1.1 promotes several 3D Tiles 1.0 extensions to ‘core’ and introduces new glTF™ extensions for fine-grained metadata storage. The candidate OGC Community Standard is identical to the Cesium release of version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles specification.

The primary enhancements in the candidate OGC 3D Tiles 1.1 include:

• Semantic metadata at multiple granularities
• Implicit tiling for improved analytics and random access to tiles
• Multiple contents per tile to support layering and content groupings
• Direct references to glTF™ content for better integration with the glTF™ ecosystem
• 3D Tiles 1.1 is backwards compatible with 3D Tiles 1.0 – aside from version number itself, valid 1.0 tilesets are also valid 1.1 tilesets.

3D Tiles was first announced at SIGGRAPH in 2015, and was published as an OGC community standard in 2019. Since then, the community has built apps, exporters, APIs, and engines with 3D Tiles to grow an open and interoperable 3D geospatial ecosystem. This collective experience building with 3D Tiles, combined with the continued growth of 3D geospatial data availability, especially semantic metadata, and increasing user interest in digital twins and the metaverse, has led to this revision of the 3D Tiles specification.

A Community Standard is an official standard of OGC that is developed and maintained external to the OGC. The originator of the standard brings to OGC a “snapshot” of their work that is then endorsed by OGC membership as a stable, widely implemented standard that becomes part of the OGC Standards Baseline.

The candidate 3D Tiles v1.1 Community Standard is available for review and comment on the OGC Portal. Comments are due by September 23, 2022, and should be submitted via the method outlined on the 3D Tiles v1.1 Community Standard’s public comment request page.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of more than 550 experts representing industry, government, research and academia, collaborating to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practices; collaborating on problem solving in agile innovation initiatives; participating in member meetings, events, and workshops; and more.

OGC's unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.

OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future.

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