Real-Time Urban Visualization: Virtual London Case Study

We present a case-study of building a real-time urban visualisation for the Greater London area. The model that we have created integrates a variety of high quality mapping resources, but emphasises real-time access to the whole model. The model is extensive (a roughly circular area of 60km diameter), and densely populated with polygon detail down to side-walks and aerial photography in limited areas at 10cm. The combined authoring & run-time system calculates image imposters, and dynamically caches these, and switches in geometry to maintain an interactive frame-rate. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism; I.3.2 [Computer Graphics]: Graphics Systems