New apps offer 3D views of Zurich

Zürich, February 2022

The city of Zurich is making a digital twin of buildings, trees and forests publicly available. She has published two apps for this purpose: Zurich virtual and Zurich 4D. The latter adds the time axis to the three digital dimensions.

The city of Zurich is making a 3D city model accessible to the general public. According to a media release , two applications have been developed for this. According to the information provided, the Zurich virtual app allows freely selectable views of buildings, trees, forests and bridges. The Zurich 4D app focuses on structural development in space and time. Current building construction projects, design plans and completed architectural competitions should be visualized there. Both apps are freely available to the public, including schools, as open data.

According to the city, they are primarily aimed at planners and specialists from architecture and engineering. Functions such as measuring the height of buildings or casting shadows will be of professional interest to them. The documentation of real estate is also possible with it.

As the city of Zurich also reports, the underlying technologies are already being used within the administration for the visualization of noise simulations, in the context of architectural competitions and for the integral presentation of civil engineering and building construction projects.

As the city of Zurich also reports, the two apps were created as part of the city council’s strategy focus on the digital city. They are part of the so-called digital twin, the digital representation of the city of Zurich.

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