Understand how InstaLOD became the vital ingredient for Korea's premier 3D mapping service Kakaomap.
Kakaomap is Korea's leading mapping service that provides up-to-date and highly detailed information of cities and places of Korea. Users can receive quality recommendations for famous restaurants, interesting sights to see as well as cultural events. The realtime navigation feature generates routes for cars and pedestrians and includes accurate information for all types of public transportation. Novelties such as Skyview and Roadview give insight into the development of Korea's cities and landscape by allowing the user to time-travel into the past.
Their latest technology 3D Skyview renders cities and geographic detail in stunning true to life 3D. However, the company faced many challenges trying to process large amounts of geographical as well as residential and industrial building data while maintaining a high-degree of visual fidelity.
¶ Painless Integration.
The data processing pipelines of the Kakaomap service are built using the C++ programming language, so the team was able to leverage the InstaLOD C++ Software Development Kit without having to develop specialized code to glue both technologies together. The InstaLOD SDK proved to be a modern and approachable programming interface so the team didn't have to spent a lot of time learning a convoluted and out-dated library. Instead, the engineers could make use of the integrations of InstaLOD into content creation tools such as Autodesk's 3ds Max to understand how modifying parameters impacts the generated data.
¶ Superior Performance.
Due to the complex nature of building data, the Skyview team faced difficulties when optimizing individual buildings, both by hand and when attempting to automate the process with other data- optimization solutions.
With InstaLOD's powerful remeshing functionality the team was able to solve all problems as the technology produced optimal results for all kinds of buildings. InstaLOD consistently constructed high-quality level-of-detail (LOD) models by reducing the number of polygons to the ideal, automatically computed target level.
Once the data size of the buildings was reduced, the team was able to automate the reduction of the massive amount of textures and materials the 3D Skyview service required to render a city scene. This reduction not only exponentially improved the actual scene rendering performance - it also greatly improved download speeds when accessing the service on a mobile connection. In addition to excellent usability and consistency producing outstanding data, InstaLOD's processing speed outperformed all other technologies that the team at Kakao evaluated prior to committing to InstaLOD.
¶ Delivering on the promise.
With InstaLOD the Kakaomap data processing pipeline is now able to generate assets directly consumable by the mapping service.
By integrating InstaLOD, the company was able to fully deliver on their 3D Skyview service vision and provide users in all regions of Korea with the high quality data.
"InstaLOD is a vital solution for the 3D Skyview service in Kakaomap, which relieves trade-off problems between data quality and capacity." - Lead engineer, Kakaomap
First published: 17th Jul 2019