October 24-26, 2007
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Interactions: Description

 

Accessing information through a 3D interactive environment   go to paper

Marcello Carrozzino, IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Italy
Heinz Leitner, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, Germany
Fawzi Mohamed, Humboldt Universitat, Germany
Laura Pecchioli, IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Italy

In this paper we want to present a new method to access geo-referenced information through the interactive navigation of a synthetic 3D model. A novel aspect of our approach is the use of Gaussian functions to define the zones of the 3D space to which the information is connected to. The relevance of information is defined as the overlap of the view zone, which is the portion of the 3D space currently viewed, with the information zone. This allows to provide an intuitive interface where information is retrieved just looking around and provided in relevance order.

A desired development is the possibility to acquire, process and analyse geographic information without needing to install proprietary GIS software, or having deep GIS knowledge, in order to provide accessibility to a larger audience. This is achieved by making the software work with commonly available hardware and through the Internet without any special requirement. We also show a first attempt to use this method as an interactive smart guide.

Demonstration: Demonstrations [Close-Up]

Keywords: 3D, Cultural Heritage, Web GIS, 3D interface, Gaussian Overlap, Ranking, XVR