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1 3D Terrain visualization for Web GIS Chao Zhu, Eng Chong Tan, Tony Kai Yun Chan Center for Advanced Media Technology Nanyang Technological University 50 Nanyang Avenue Singapore 639798 Key words: Terrain, visualization, Web GIS, VRML Abstract: The Web has become a new medium which can display geographical information in rich forms and offer user-friendly interfaces. One of the promising trends in current Geographical Information System (GIS) is the use of Web 3D technology, especially VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling language). As one of the most fundamental geographical information, terrain information is often presented as the base for the display of other information, such as urban buildings, streets, population density, distributions of specific plants and so on. However, the 3D visualization of terrain on Web is a disaster for low bandwidth network users because of the large amount of data it involves. In this paper, we proposed and implemented a tile-based selective visualization method to facilitate 3D Web surfing. This tile concept also helps to develop a geo-information query system based on 3D terrain visualization. A Web GIS prototype has been designed and implemented featuring a hybrid 2D-3D interface. 1. Introduction The combination of Virtual Reality (VR) and GIS is not really a new topic. From the early 1990s, scientists began to explore the possibility of using 3D visualization technologies to interactively represent urban buildings [Day 1994]. One of the major tools they used is VRML, a high level objected-oriented language for the description of scenes and behaviors of 3D objects. VRML has been widely accepted as an international standard of interactive visualization since 1997, when ISO VRML97, or so called VRML2.0, is released [Web 1]. Kate Moore [Moore et al. 1997] started the project of The Virtual Field Course which used a VRML interface to explore a geographic database and multimedia resources fieldwork areas. The problems of geo-referenced V