As an archaeo-geomatician using QGIS on a daily basis, I asked myself while drawing the map for an archaeological protohistoric excavation: what if we could give life to this flat blueprint, digging trenches and elevating walls and postholes into structures we could wander around?

At the same time, I was doing this exact job using well-known game creation systems (GCS) like Unity or Godot for a 3D, browser-based WebGL render. I then decided to give my idea a try. The challenge was to create a lightweight, efficient workflow simple enough for most users to handle. Choices had to be made, from the coordinate reference system (CRS) to the output format of the levels and, more importantly, the HTML5 engine designed to render this data as a 3D, browsable world.

The result is a web-based tool where uploaded GeoJSON files are interpreted on the fly, linking geographical features to 3D assets and table attributes to game triggers and events. On the QGIS side, native functions and dedicated plugins can ease environment generation by distributing vegetation or linking heightmaps for a roamable topography.

This interesting, open-source use case of QGIS aims to merge the best of both the 2D and 3D worlds, making volumetric world creation accessible. This toolkit can come in handy for popularizing work for larger or more specialized audiences, similar to the way Building Information Modeling (BIM) does.