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)

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

Geospatial Camera

• [x] Basic camera implementation
• [x] Pan/Drag
• [x] Rotate (yaw/pitch)
• [x] Wheel zoom to cursor / center
• [x] API changes to support setting yaw/pitch/radius/center directly
• [x] Double tap zoom to cursor
• [x] Limits / Speed / Inertia
• [x] Touch input (multi-finger pan / zoom)
• [x] Keyboard input (pan/rotate/zoom)
• [x] FlyTo (animation/interpolation) - linear and arced
• [ ] Collision Detection
• [x] 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