Cesium Certified Developer Program

Project: 3D visualization of health care facilities in South Africa

Introduction

  • Project Name : 3D Visualization of health care facilities in South Africa
  • Project goal : To apply in a real life situation, the Cesium.js knowledge I've gained from lessons and skills developed in this Cesium certification program.
  • Student name : Nompumelelo Mtsweni

This documentation aims to explain the process I took to develop the project. Please go through the documentation keeping in mind that it is meant to explain my process and my approach to developing with Cesium.js and not necessarily a guide based on the best practises for working with Cesium.js.
If you spot any errors in the documentation, please email me : lelonompumelelo@gmail.com to correct them.

Thank you to the Cesium team, for accepting my application and thank you for the taking the time to read this.

About the project

Where did it all start?

Back in 2020, we developed a mapping web application using Google maps with the goal of locating health care facilities across South Africa.

I had fun working on this project and that is the reason I chose to revisit it and work from it to apply my newly acquired Cesium.js skills and knowledge gained so far.

Below I list the inputs or the requirements I gathered before getting started to do the work:

  1. Visual Studio Code with live server extension
  2. A github repo from Cesium downloaded
  3. JSON data with a list of all health care facilities gatheed backed in 2020
  4. Icons for health care facilities
  5. Shapefile of the district map of South Africa - json file
  6. Population by district data to incorporate into the district map to show in the 3D Cesium.js globe

The district map data, the health facilities data along with the population data are from sources that are outdated and might not reflect accurately the current realities in South Africa.

I preferred all the data to be in a json format because I am more comfortable working with this format, so in the next section - I explain the process of converting data that was in json format (including geojson) to become what I needed it to be.

Data Processing

District map shape file needed to be found and so is the data to be used on it.

To get the district map shape files, I visited igismap where I easily downloaded the shape file and it worked. See below:

For the data to show on the map, I used Humdata.org to get the population of South Africa by district with a breakdown between female and male. Initially it was in an excel spreadsheet - I used the Mapshaper to popualate the data into the shape file.

Flow diagram

The flow digram below aims to show sequentially the order of event triggers based on the use's decisions when interacting with the User Interface.

Design

Below is a rough wireframe/ sketch - handdrawn to get the idea out of my mind into the real world.

Challenges

I faced a couple of challenges while working on this project, see them below:

  • Google geolocation API quota reached - I could not implement this feature
  • Disappearing of billboards when zooming in
  • Google's 3D tiles render slowly than expected

  • Node.js and Webpack incompatibility issues on my local environment.

    • Solutions

  • Instead of using the Google's API for geolocation, I used Cesium.js's Geocode Search functionality as a substitude.
  • One of the team member from Cesium provided a solution to the problem I had shared with the community through the forum. She was really helpful - although I ended up not showing the names.
  • It could be my internet connection but I still find these tiles taking a while to load.
  • I used the Cesium's public github repo as my project's skeleton/scafold.

    • Codebase - Cesium.js

    Getting started

    To quickly get up and running with this project, I used the steps below:

  • Download the Cesium 1.107.0 public github repo.
  • Preview the app's folder.
  • Start a fresh .html index page and include the Cesium.js local scripts that are contained in the project.
  • Create a Cesium Ion account to get the default Access Token
  • Add the district map geojson file with map shaper files and district population data.
  • Add the json file with the all health facilities as objects with their properties.
  • Write custom js file to connect the district map geojson in Cesium viewer.
  • Extend the custom .js file to map the health facilities.
  • Further extend the custom .js file to use Google's 3D photorealistic tiles and implement the flyover effect.
  • Style the user interface a bit and add the feedback Google form.

    • The code

    Snippets of the custom .js script file are shown below:
    For feature #1 - where the district map overlays on the Cesium globe.

    For adding health facilities into the Cesium globe

    For using Google's 3D Realistic tiles and flyover effect:

    Styling

    I have re-used the basic css that came with the Cesium github repo, a few inline stylings and an animated icon to apply a bit of styling into this web application. See below how:

    Github commits

    To version control, I started with github at first but instead of creating a new repository, I nested it under some private personal projects. For submission purposes, I moved it into Google drive but I am planning to create a new public repo once the review process has been completed and this work has been accepted.

    Full source code access

    The completed project's source code can be found here.

    Demo

    Credits

    This project used animated icons from Lordicon and static icons from iconfinder, district map was edited using Map shaper, the first draft of this documentation was done using Readme.so editor, the district population data shown on the district map is from Humdata.org , the shapefile of the district map is from igismap

    This documentation is from a template by Themeforest under an open source license and they describe more about licenses here: choosealicense.com.