For the final project (also called case-study) of minor 3D virtual earth given at TU Delft we created a tool (velas3D) to improve the accessibility and the handling of the AHN2 dataset. The AHN2 (Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland) dataset is an elevation dataset covering whole Netherlands.  It contains about 10 points/m² so that’s about 338,000,000,000 points. This AHN2 dataset is ordered in tiles. With the tool velas3D it is possible to download seamless datasets.

The project was done in a group of 3 students (Michiel Degen, Ravi Peters and me, Brett Rijnders) all with different backgrounds (respectively: “Technology, Policy and Management“, “electrical engineering” and  “Aerospace engineering“). For this project we had about 9 weeks and it was supervised by Hugo Ledoux and Gerwin de Haan.  The presentation was held last Wednesday March 10th 2010, it was made in prezi:

The name of the tool “velas3D” is partly based on the special file format we used. We used the binary las format to work with AHN2 dataset. This dataset is actually a 3D dataset, therefore we used 3D in the tool name. Since we were dealing with a Virtual Earth in our tool we also put the first letters “ve” in the name of our tool.  More information about our Velas3D tool can be found in our paper:

Paper – Case Study Velas3D tool.pdf