Geospatial Features (Large World Rendering, Geospatial Camera, 3D Tile Loader)

[georginahalpern]

This issue tracks progress on 9.0 features related to geospatial support in Babylon.js

This includes

• Large world rendering (internally offsetting world to be camera-centric to avoid jittering caused by floating point imprecision with large coordinates)
• Geospatial camera (designed to orbit a globe in 3D)
• Base 3D Tile Loader (supporting explicit tileset.jsons holding gltf data)

Large World Rendering (floating origin)

• Basic offset support
• Instances
• Shadow Generator/Cascader
• WebGPU
• Particle
• Water/Sky materials
• Node material blocks
• Sprites
• Reflection Probes
• Utility Layer
• Multi-Scene
• Physics / Havok support
• Documentation

Geospatial Camera

• Basic camera implementation
• Pan/Drag
• Rotate (yaw/pitch)
• Wheel zoom to cursor / center
• API changes to support setting yaw/pitch/radius/center directly
• Double tap zoom to cursor
• Limits / Speed / Inertia
• Touch input (multi-finger pan / zoom)
• Keyboard input (pan/rotate/zoom)
• FlyTo (animation/interpolation) - linear and arced
• Collision Detection
• Pole-specific clamping
• Documentation
• ------ Below are nice to haves -----
• Support multi-planet systems (globe not centered at origin)
• Support additional movement patterns (ex: straight-line movement via vector, zoom by fov, zoom by scaling target)
• Separate checkInputs to not be nested
• ZoomLevel API (complementary to radius)
• Reconciling base camera improvement ideas, genericized inputs ( see https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/geospatialcamera-and-genericized-camera-inputs/61291/5)

3D Tile Loader

• Explicit tileset.json url parser/validator
• Math.geo converters between wgs84 and ECEF coordinate systems
• TileRenderer (takes tileset.json and uses gltf loader to load meshes based on what is in camera view)
• Documentation
• ------ Below are nice to haves -----
• Extension mechanism to load other tilesets, ex: implicit tileset