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Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes

Marco Di Benedetto, Paolo Cignoni, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, and Roberto Scopigno

October 2009

Abstract

We focus on developing a simple and efficient unified level-of-detail structure for networked urban model viewers. At the core of our approach is a revisitation of the BlockMap data structure, originally introduced for encoding coarse representations of blocks of buildings to be used as direction-independent impostors when rendering far-away city blocks. The contribution of this paper is manifold: we extend the BlockMap representation to support sloped surfaces and input-sensitive sampling of color; we introduce a novel sampling strategy for building accurate BlockMaps; we show that BlockMaps can be used as a versatile and robust way to parameterize the visible surface of a highly complex model; we improve the expressiveness of urban models rendering by integrating an ambient occlusion term in the representation and describe an efficient method for computing it; we illustrate the design and implementation of a urban models streaming and visualization system and demonstrate its efficiency when browsing large city models in a limited bandwidth setting.

Reference and download information

Marco Di Benedetto, Paolo Cignoni, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, and Roberto Scopigno. Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes. In The 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. Pages 9-16, October 2009.

Related multimedia productions

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Marco Di Benedetto, Paolo Cignoni, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Roberto Scopigno
Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes
CRS4 Video n. 149 - Date: February 2009
VAST 2009 Multimedia Proceedings

Bibtex citation record

@InProceedings{DiBenedetto:2009:IRE,
    author = {Marco {Di Benedetto} and Paolo Cignoni and Fabio Ganovelli and Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton and Roberto Scopigno},
    title = {Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes},
    booktitle = {The 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage},
    pages = {9--16},
    month = {October},
    year = {2009},
    abstract = { We focus on developing a simple and efficient unified level-of-detail structure for networked urban model viewers. At the core of our approach is a revisitation of the BlockMap data structure, originally introduced for encoding coarse representations of blocks of buildings to be used as direction-independent impostors when rendering far-away city blocks. The contribution of this paper is manifold: we extend the BlockMap representation to support sloped surfaces and input-sensitive sampling of color; we introduce a novel sampling strategy for building accurate BlockMaps; we show that BlockMaps can be used as a versatile and robust way to parameterize the visible surface of a highly complex model; we improve the expressiveness of urban models rendering by integrating an ambient occlusion term in the representation and describe an efficient method for computing it; we illustrate the design and implementation of a urban models streaming and visualization system and demonstrate its efficiency when browsing large city models in a limited bandwidth setting. },
    url = {http://vic.crs4.it/vic/cgi-bin/bib-page.cgi?id='DiBenedetto:2009:IRE'},
}