Research on development approaches of virtual campus walkthrough based on GIS and VIRTOOLS technologies

The virtual campus walkthrough,which has been developed with VRML and WTK,has such characteristics as interaction and immersion,but it can't provide the geographical information browse and query besides developing virtual campus is difficult in prac-tice.A new development approach of virtual campus walkthrough based on GIS and VIRTOOLS technologies,which is called GIVT,is proposed.Namely,GIVT constructs the 3D campus scene and creates the 3D virtual object with animation using 3DMAX,processes and interacts on the geographical data with VIRTOOLS.It is showed by experiments that GIVT can not only resolve those disadvantages,but also improve interaction,immersion,simplification and realization,etc.