The V-City Project

3D geoinformatics have entered the digital age, hesitantly in some areas, and rampantly in others. Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth are household names. However, these projects are limited to textured 3D landscapes, aerial 2D images and a few boxy building envelopes. The V-City project is a European research initiative to surpass these limitations, and create a system for intuitively exploring large urban areas with a high degree of detail. Bringing together technologies from geoinformatics, virtual reality, computer graphics, and computer vision, the system constructs detailed 3D city models from geopositioned aerial images and building footprints. For networked browsing, city models are compressed and streamed for interactive viewing of entire landscapes. A unique tactile table has also been developed to let multiple users visualize the same city model in stereo 3D, and interact with it simultaneously using hand gestures.