Last week, a colleague of mine has presented a paper I co-authored in the 10th IASTED International Conference on Computer Graphics and Imaging, held in Austria between 13 to 15 February. The title of the paper is ‘Virtual City Maker And Virtual Navigator: A Modelling And Visualisation Solution For The Creation And Display Of Mobile 3D Virtual Cities’ and presents a complete procedural 3D modelling and visualisation solution for mobile devices. Nevertheless there is a growing need for computer-based, photorealistic visualizations of 3D urban environments in many areas including environmental planning, engineering, telecommunications, architecture, gaming, 3D city information systems and even homeland security. Therefore, the procedural modelling and mobile visualisation of virtual cities in 3D is a topic not only computer graphics research but also other fields such as GIS or photogrammetry have focused on for a number of years.
The modelling tool is based on scripting algorithms allowing for both the automatic and also semi-automatic creation of photorealistic quality virtual urban content. The input data used include the combination of aerial images, GIS data, 2D ground maps and terrestrial photographs grouped with a user-friendly customized interface which permits for the automatic and interactive generation of large-scale, accurate, georeferenced and fully-textured 3D virtual city content. This content can be specially optimized for use with mobile devices but also with navigational tasks in mind. Moreover, a user-centred mobile virtual reality (VR) visualisation and interaction tool operating on PDAs called Virtual Navigator specifically designed for pedestrian navigation is also presented. This engine supports the import and display of various navigational file formats (2D and 3D) and also includes a comprehensive front-end user-friendly graphical user interface providing immersive virtual 3D navigation to a wide range of users.A draft version of the paper can be downloaded from here.