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How Forum Virium Helsinki enabled the City of Helsinki to modernize reality capture
Forum Virium Helsinki partnered with LumiDB to facilitate a technology pilot for the City of Helsinki’s Urban Environment Division. The initiative replaced manual hard drive shipments with API-driven data streaming, demonstrating how a centralized database improves security and accessibility for city planners.
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Forum Virium Helsinki, the innovation company of the City of Helsinki, facilitates pilot projects to test digital technologies in urban environments. Jukka Alander, a Technical Specialist at Forum Virium, championed the introduction of LumiDB to support the City of Helsinki’s transition toward digital twins. By bringing this technology to the Urban Environment Division, Alander aimed to solve the persistent bottlenecks caused by outdated, file-based processes.
The challenge
Legacy storage created silos within the City
City workflows were historically decentralized and manual. Alander observed that teams often duplicated point-cloud data, and files moved between servers, contractors, and local drives with limited visibility. Physical hard drives remained a primary method for transferring data, introducing security risks and delays.
This fragmentation meant that the City's reality-capture assets often sat on disks, duplicated and outdated, rather than serving as an accessible resource for planning. The pilot exposed this "development debt," revealing how legacy methods struggled to support the City's modern infrastructure goals.
The solution
Facilitating a move to a streaming database
Forum Virium Helsinki brought LumiDB into the City’s ecosystem to demonstrate a database-centric architecture. The goal was to prove that the City could centralize storage and stream 3D data directly to browsers and connected platforms via API.
The pilot prioritized immediate interoperability with the City’s diverse software ecosystem. LumiDB established direct data streams to 6DPlanner, Kunta3D, QGIS, and Virtual City Systems. This broad integration allowed the team to bypass file-based handoffs entirely, proving that heavy reality capture data could flow seamlessly into CAD, GIS, and digital twin applications without complex configuration.
Alander noted that the minimalist interface of the LumiDB viewer was crucial for adoption. By stripping away complexity, the system allowed non-technical stakeholders at the City to instantly visualize large point clouds.
The results
Validating a modern data backbone for Helsinki
The pilot validated API-driven streaming as a viable replacement for manual data handling, effectively creating a single source of truth for the City’s reality capture assets. This transition exposed the limitations of legacy workflows, where physical media transfers and uncontrolled file duplication created security blind spots. By centralizing storage, the team ensured that massive datasets remained within a managed environment rather than being scattered across disconnected drives. Furthermore, the successful integration across this diverse software stack demonstrated that a unified backbone could reliably feed the City’s broader digital ecosystem, building a strong business case for ending the reliance on hard drives.
Future outlook
Open standards and the path to 2025
Looking ahead, Alander emphasized the importance of open standards, such as OGC interfaces, to ensure long-term viability for the City. He also noted the potential to extend this database approach to other spatial data types, including meshes and rasters.
The pilot aligns with Helsinki’s broader strategy to make its data the most accessible and utilized in the world. By facilitating the transition from file silos to a connected data backbone, Forum Virium Helsinki has supported the City's move toward efficient, secure, and collaborative infrastructure management.
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