Traffic microsimulations generate detailed information about vehicle movements, interactions, and traffic-control systems. However, the resulting data can be difficult to communicate and interpret, particularly when researchers want to understand how a traffic scenario may be experienced from a human perspective.
FEDORA Researchers from ETH Zurich designed sumo3Dviz, a lightweight, open-source 3D visualisation pipeline for traffic simulations created with SUMO(1). The tool converts standard SUMO outputs (including vehicle trajectories, road networks, static objects, and traffic-signal states) into high-quality images and videos using a Python-based workflow.
A central design goal was to provide an accessible alternative to complex game-engine-based visualisation environments. sumo3Dviz can be installed through pip, works across major operating systems, and does not require proprietary software. Its scriptable configuration also makes it suitable for reproducible and automated workflows.
The tool supports several camera modes. Researchers can visualise a scene from a fixed external viewpoint, follow a vehicle from an ego-centric perspective, create cinematic camera movements, or interactively explore a static environment. Trajectory interpolation and orientation smoothing ensure that vehicles move coherently despite the discrete time steps used in traffic simulation.
These capabilities make sumo3Dviz useful not only for presenting simulation results, but also for teaching, model validation, stakeholder communication, and human-centred experiments investigating perceptions such as safety, comfort, trust, and acceptance.
By combining simplicity, reproducibility, and perceptually meaningful visualisation, sumo3Dviz helps bridge the gap between numerical traffic-simulation outputs and the way traffic scenarios are actually observed and experienced.
You can find a preprint version of the research paper here and the source code for sumo3dviz here.
Find some sample sumo3dviz visualisations below:
(1) SUMO: Simulation of Urban MObility (Eclipse SUMO or simply SUMO), an open source multi-modal traffic simulation package capable of handling large networks. Developed by the German Aerospace Center it is currently an Eclipse Foundation project (repository: https://github.com/eclipse-sumo/sumo). For other works relevant to SUMO developed within the FEDORA framework, see also here.