Laval Virtual 2007 Article

In a few days (18-22 April) the latest paper I have co-authored with members of the giCentre will be presented in the 9th International Conference on Virtual Reality at Laval in France. The title of the paper is 'Automatic Modelling, Generation And Visualisation Of Realistic 3D Virtual Cities For Mobile Navigation'. The paper presents a comprehensive procedural 3D modelling solution called Virtual City Maker, which relies on scripting algorithms for automatic generation of photorealistic virtual urban content. This solution uses the combination of aerial images, terrestrial photographic input and 2D ground maps in conjunction with a user-friendly customized interface allowing for automatically and interactively generating accurate georeferenced textured 3D virtual city content from this information, specially optimized for use with mobile devices and navigation.

The paper also discusses the development and introduction of an innovative mobile virtual reality visualisation engine operating on a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), called Virtual Navigator, which supports the import of 3D visualization file formats and also includes a front-end user-centered interface for fully immersive virtual 3D navigation. Finally, experiments with the resulting models, the engine and a number of human subjects have been conducted in order to gain insight on the issues of efficient modelling for mobile navigation but also assess some of the usability issues of the interface. Ten volunteers, seven male and three female, participated in our experiments which were tested on the Dell PDA running Virtual Navigator. The results from this study showed that users found Virtual Navigator most appropriate for learning an unexplored environment and reasonably easy to use.

The original article may be accessed online from here.