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 them 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 information, both in 2D and 3D. One of the central components of Virtual Sardinia is i3D, a high-speed 3D scene viewer for the World-wide Web. 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. This allows to explore interactively a three-dimensional reconstruction of the island of Sardinia built from a digital terrain model texture-mapped with satellite images. Alternate interactive views of the model are provided in the form of movies, sequences, or clickable maps. The combination of these models becomes a natural front-end for querying all kinds of scientific, cultural, and touristic information about Sardinia. We believe that this approach opens a new way to create regional information systems easily available that could be made available to the general public
The multimedia works listed here are included as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.