Application for GSOC 2015

Yibin_Liao · March 16, 2015, 4:28am

Hello,

My name is Yibin Liao. I’m a graduate student at the University of Georgia, USA.

I’m very interested in the project “Cesium demos pack”, and I have several questions:

I know the application starts tomorrow, is this too late to discuss some ideas for the project?
I saw a bunch of ideas under the project “Cesium demos pack”, how many available slots of this project can we apply?
I’m very interested in doing some projects with HTML5 and Cesium. Some HTML5 APIs such as video and geolocation are mentioned in the web page. Is that OK to work with some other APIs such as canvas? I’m wondering if it is possible to write a HTML5-based 3D game with Cesium or combine Cesium with other 3D frameworks such as Three.js. If yes, I would like to write some cool HTML5 games with Cesium as a demo to show that the Cesium could also be used as a 3D game engine, like Three.js. If this is hard to implement, I can go back to the list and think more about how to interact with other APIs.

I’m looking forward to any advice.

Best Regards,

Yibin Liao

Computer Science Department

University of Georgia

tigerlyb@gmail.com

Homepage: http://cobweb.cs.uga.edu/~liao/

Matt_Amato · March 17, 2015, 7:04pm

Certainly not, and even once applications are closed general discussion of Cesium features or ideas is always welcome.
As many as you are comfortable with, it’s pretty open ended. That being said, we would rather have someone have one really well thought out idea than multiple ideas that aren’t well fleshed out.
Cesium is heavily customizable and it may certainly be possible to integrate with Three in a number of ways, such as mapping Three ObjLoaders to Cesium Geoemtry or by doing direct webGL-level integration. It all depends on your skill level. Three integration might be very difficult to pull off unless you have good graphics programming experience, so keep that in mind when you apply.

The best way to create a good application is to both show past work (links on GitHub are fine) as well as include a detailed plan for what you would like to do and your general strategy for how you are going to do it.

And I probably sound like a broken record at this point to people who follow the mailing list, but be sure to go through our contributor’s guide and familiarize yourself with the Cesium development process.

Thanks and good luck!

Matt

Yibin_Liao · March 22, 2015, 12:26am

Hi Matt,

Thank you so much for your reply. Since you mentioned the difficulties of Three integration, based on my experience and background, I would like to switch to another idea.

I have done some Google Earth Plug-in projects in the past. One of my project is called ULLGoogleEarth, and was developed as a 3D map guide tool for current and new students at the University of Louisiana. This web application includes building locator with video, image and links embedded, distance and area calculation tool, 3D tour, and driving simulator. This is the link: http://cobweb.cs.uga.edu/~liao/ULL_Google_Earth/

If interested, you can also check with some of my other tools such as HydroViz, which you find in that link too.

This application was develop a few yeas ago. Since google earth api has been deprecated, and the google map api is upgrade to version 3 right now. Some of the tools may not work properly . Therefore, I would like to extend this projects to Cesium and replace the google earth plug-in. I made a simple demo with Cesium: http://tigerlyb.github.io/cesium/Apps/Sandcastle/gallery/ULLEarthMap.html. Is that enough for an application? I could implement more in the future.

Currently I only implemented the following: loading KML files with images and links embedded, flying to some buildings or landmarks, and adding placemarks on earth. I would like to implement more functions such as the calculation tool, driving simulator. In addition, I have been thinking of using some of the HTML5 apis such as geolocation. For example, students can locate themselves on campus, and all related academic information such as buildings with department names and links, class schedule, events time, etc can be marked on the earth map. This could benefit all the student. Cesium is a JS library, so no plugin need, and it’s cross-platform, students can also use their mobile phone with it. This is the main reason that I really would like to work on.

I’m not sure if this idea is good for applying the project “Cesium demos pack”. I could describe more details in the proposal. I have a full plan strategies for doing this. Just a quick question, for writing a detailed plan in the proposal, do I need to write a full schedule such as by which date and time I should complete what task?

Thanks again for your time.

Best regards.