Publication
From Real Cities to Virtual Worlds Using an Open Modular Architecture
Philipp Slusallek; Rainer Jochem; Sergiy Byelozyorov; Vincent Pegoraro
In: N. Magnenat-Thalmann (Hrsg.). The Visual Computer, Vol. 29, Pages 141-153, Springer-Verlag, 2012.
Abstract
The technologies for the Web and virtual worlds
are currently converging, but although there are some efforts
made to integrate them with each other, they typically rely
on technologies foreign to most Web developers. In this paper,
we present a new open architecture that combines several
emerging and established technologies to provide convenient
tools for developing virtual worlds directly in the
Web. These technologies are easy to learn and understand
by the Web community and allow for quick prototyping.
Overall the modular architecture allows virtual worlds to be
developed more quickly and more widely deployed. Additionally,
we demonstrate that creating an adequate virtual
environment can be an easy task when applying the principles
of crowd-sourcing. We present an application that uses
one of the largest available open data sources of geospatial
information to bring 3D cities from the real world into the
virtual environment.