Making It Realtime: Exploring the use of optimized realtime environments for historical simulation and education.
Chris Calef, Mythworks / University of Aizu, USA
James Goodwin, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Janet Goodwin, Aizu History Project, USA
Carl Vilbrandt, University of Aizu, Japan
Turlif Vilbrandt, University of Aizu, Japan
http://www.u-aizu.net/sw/

Session: Experiencing Complex Data

As museums and educators struggle with the challenges of presenting their material in a digital format, many overlook the application that has spearheaded the development of virtual reality for the average consumer: 3D realtime game engines. These 3D game engines offer greater versatility, usability, maturity, simulation and codebase than most current 3D realtime frameworks. At the University of Aizu, we are using the Quake engine in conjunction with the Povray raytracing engine to attack the problem of visualization and simulation from two sides. We have modeled a temple from northern Japan that users can experience in realtime. However, to deal with the limitations of simulation in realtime, we have added the ability for users to select a view for greater detail. The selected view is rendered in the background as the users continue to travel through the temple, and is delivered in a separate window when finished. Our paper will describe relevant game paradigms, their usefulness, and our work in detail, including problems and solutions we have discovered along the way, and conclude with suggestions on how this work could assist museums and educators in simulation and modeling.