Data-Driven Compute Overlays for Interactive Geographic Simulation and Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces GPU-based data-driven compute overlays for interactive 3D geographic maps, enabling real-time simulation and visualization of phenomena like snow cover and avalanches with significantly improved speed over traditional methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel GPU-accelerated multi-step compute workflow for dynamic geographic simulations in web and native applications, enhancing interactivity and performance.

Findings

Real-time avalanche simulation in milliseconds to seconds

Significant speedup over Python implementations

Effective visualization of adjustable simulation parameters

Abstract

We present interactive data-driven compute overlays for native and web-based 3D geographic map applications based on WebGPU. Our data-driven overlays are generated in a multi-step compute workflow from multiple data sources on the GPU. We demonstrate their potential by showing results from snow cover and avalanche simulations, where simulation parameters can be adjusted interactively and results are visualized instantly. Benchmarks show that our approach can compute large-scale avalanche simulations in milliseconds to seconds, depending on the size of the terrain and the simulation parameters, which is multiple orders of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art Python implementation.