ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9050 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-4-2026-349-2026 The UoC Virtual Campus 3D Geospatial Data Infrastructure Shaji Rijin 1 Hinzer Calvin 2 Castrucci Elena 1 Schuster Jessica 3 Naatz Nils 3 Rauchalles Julia 1 Willmes Christian https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5566-6542 1 Institute of Geography, University of Cologne, Germany Advanced Media Institute, Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany Department for Digital Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany 10 07 2026 XI-4-2026 349 357 Copyright: © 2026 Rijin Shaji et al. 2026 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-4-2026/349/2026/isprs-annals-XI-4-2026-349-2026.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-4-2026/349/2026/isprs-annals-XI-4-2026-349-2026.pdf

The Virtual Campus Project at the University of Cologne (UoC) has as a main objective the creation of a highly detailed 3D model of the university campus and its publication and distribution through OGC 3D Tiles. Further objectives include the development of integrated applications leveraging this 3D model, such as a web-based 3D viewer, game engine-driven geospatial augmented reality (GeoAR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences, and an indoor positioning system utilizing 3D building models indoor geometries. This paper focuses on and details the methodology for developing and implementing the georeferenced 3D model and establishes an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 3D Tiles-compliant Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The main result is a Tool Suite or Software Framework and the description of the tool pipeline or workflows for collecting, creating and modelling the 3D geospatial data and publishing it as OGC 3D Tiles data. This framework ensures campus-wide 3D data accessibility through 3D Tiles standard clients, including Desktop GIS like ArcGIS or QGIS, game engines like Unity, Unreal or O3DE and Webmapping libraries like MapLibre, three.js or CesiumJS.