Alpenblick Visualizer
Austria is largely covered by the Alps and their countless summits, but from where can you actually see them? The Alpenblick app answers that question with an interactive 3D map of peak visibility across the country.
The Alpenblick app lets you navigate a 3D map of Austria and read mountain-peak visibility for any location. A click on the map reveals the perspective from that point looking toward the closest summit. An opaque overlay shows where peaks are visible from: the more intense the colour, the more peaks. Each summit is marked with a label floating above it.
The project is also a study in how far a small amount of code can go when the right components are available off the shelf. In the GIS world this kind of question is a viewshed analysis, a standard tool in any GIS suite. Feeding a publicly available high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) through that pipeline produces a layer showing visibility from each location within 100 km, computed from an observation height of 1.60 m (roughly eye-level) toward the significant summits of the Austrian Alps.
The app itself is a web build using CesiumJS for accurate 3D rendering of the terrain surface; the library's geospatial primitives make it possible to assemble a usable 3D scene in only a few lines. Data was pre-processed with the open-source QGIS and uses open data: Digitales Geländemodell (DGM) Österreich by Geoland.at, and AlpsOver589m.xls by Eberhard Jurgalski et al.