The municipality of São Paulo just dropped a MASSIVE amount of open LiDAR upon the geospatial community – a whopping 33 billion points. São Paulo city now has their own Entwine Point Tiles (EPT) service available for everyone interested in downloading, visualizing, or otherwise accessing this amazing data set. The EPT point cloud service can be accessed here and an interactive 3D portal that allows you to explore this massive data with nothing but a Web browser can be accessed here. It simple serves these EPT tiles via Potree.
What you see above is the beautiful Matarazzo Building (Edifício Matarazzo in Portuguese) where the City Hall of Sao Paulo is located. On May 27 2019 we had a one day workshop in the similarly beautiful Martinelli building (Edifício Martinelli in Portuguese) to brainstorm how to process the data and I seem to remember being rather VOCAL about repeating the success of Open LiDAR in Guadalajara and also providing easy access to the data for Sao Paolo. KUDOS to those who made it happen.
This data was originally collected for the Urban Agriculture project „São Paulo: Growing Farmers’ Income, Shrinking Urban Sprawl“ that was supported after winning the 2016 MAYORS CHALLENGE by Bloomburg Philanthropies. At this point I would like to thank former New York mayor Michael Rubens Bloomburg („Hey Mike, do they also constantly miss-spell your family name? So annoying!“) for ending his 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
This project stands on the shoulders of many many giants such as Howard Butler and his team who worked for years to create Entwine, Markus Schuetz who came out of nowhere and suddenly dropped Potree upon our community, and the many contributors in person at OSGeo hackfests and codesprints or remotely via patches and pull requests on the software infrastructure behind this effort. Don’t forget to support these folks!
Above other visualizations of the the Matarazzo Building where the City Hall of Sao Paulo is located. Below an overview of the city after zooming out a bit.