Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes

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 [CDG*07] 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.
Description

        
@inproceedings{
:10.2312/VAST/VAST09/009-016
, booktitle = {
VAST: International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage
}, editor = {
Kurt Debattista and Cinzia Perlingieri and Denis Pitzalis and Sandro Spina
}, title = {{
Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes
}}, author = {
Benedetto, Marco Di
and
Cignoni, Paolo
and
Ganovelli, Fabio
and
Gobbetti, Enrico
and
Marton, Fabio
and
Scopigno, Roberto
}, year = {
2009
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISSN = {
1811-864X
}, ISBN = {
978-3-905674-18-7
}, DOI = {
/10.2312/VAST/VAST09/009-016
} }
Citation