The Virtual Sardinia project aims at collecting a large amount of heterogeneous data concerning the island of Sardinia and representing them in such a way that a casual user can easily navigate through these data in a virtual trip. All these data are interconnected in an hypermedia way, browsable in the World Wide Web, ranging from geographic to archaeological data, from historical to touristical info, both in 2D and 3D.
The central component of Virtual Sardinia is i3D, a system developed at CRS4 that combines the 3D input and high-performance rendering capabilities of high-end virtual reality systems with the data fetching abilities of network browsers. Using a Spaceball, the user can intuitively navigate with continuous viewpoint control inside three-dimensional data, while selecting 3D objects with the mouse triggers requests for access to remote media documents that can be distributed over the Internet. For the Virtual Sardinia project, the main 3D model that is explored by the users is a three-dimensional reconstruction of the island of Sardinia built from a digital terrain model texture-mapped with satellite images.
3D markers are positioned on the surface of the terrain to indicate sites of interest. The interactive selection of one of these markers during navigation is translated in a request to an associated descriptive document that can be in the form of text, still images, animations or even other 3D models, while the interactive selection of locations on the terrain triggers the request to view a high-resolution version of the region surrounding the selected location.
