3D Gaming and Cartography: Design Considerations for game-based generation of Virtual Terrain Environments

The potential of 3D gaming technology for 3D cartography has become more and more evident in the last years. This is due among other aspects to technological advances of the gaming industry. Due to this reason the authors present an approach aiming to demonstrate the possibility to obtain immersive geographic virtual environments cost effectively. To this aim freely available geographic datasets are used and a re-utilizable process is designed. In the preliminary study presented in this paper the generation of a virtual environment based on texture and elevation geographic datasets is evaluated. After fixing some restrictions and limitations both to the technology to be adopted and the datasets to be used, the selected input datasets are processed by two different, particularly for this experiment designed tools. The output delivered by the software is used as input for the terrain rendering engine. The same approach is adopted for two different datasets: one covering Central and Western Europe at lower and one covering a smaller region at higher resolution. By testing the approach on two different datasets it is aimed to demonstrate the re-usability (and therefore the cost-effectiveness) of the proposed method. Through this first evaluation it is expected to gain important knowledge in the field of 3D gaming technology for 3D cartography and to collect valuable indications. This will allow a precise definition of future steps and concrete issues toward the realisation of an immersive 3D experience in a virtual environment. Possible concrete benefits can be imagined in several application fields such as in digital educational games or 3D digital thematic atlases.