Wayne MOORE, Australia | ISBN: | Submitted: Jun 29, 1998

The Application of VRML to Cave Preservation

Engineering, population and industrial projects around the globe are threatening many ecological systems. Preservation of ecologically endangered systems is usually implemented by restrictions on access to the site. This paper presents an attempt at providing an information system that will aid in preserving ecologically endangered sites while at the same time providing virtual access to the site. This paper reports on work being carried out at Cave sites under the control of the Jenolan Caves Trust in Australia.

Karst systems are one such environmental system that exists throughout the world that is very susceptible to ecological and environmental degradation.as well as needing to preserve sociological and cultural information relating to the cave systems.

The development of an ecological database information system would be enhanced by the use a 3D modelling method that allows the visualisation of the cave systems. An ideal method of displaying relationships would be to use the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) to model the karst system under consideration. The use of VRML has the advantage of being accessible to everyone on most broswers.

As well as the research aspects of environmental information system it is very important to have an information system that will encourage tourist activity at the caves. This paper shows how the use of VRML modelling will allow tourists access to the cave system.

The construction of realistic models of 3D objects can be tedious and difficult with a great deal of time spent on creating accurate models of objects of interest. Ecological modeling is made difficult by irregular surfaces such as cave walls.

The cave systems chosen have measurements that are very crude or minimal in that surveying a cave is difficult at the best of times and almost impossible at others. It was decided to use measurements made by amateur speleological groups of the Jenolan cave system for some VRML models.

Texture modeling is from digitized pictures and using software running on a Silicon Graphics O2 workstation. The pictures were taken using positive films as well as a digital camera. Software was written in C and Java to automatically generate VRML code.

Environmental models must have accurate data measurements to make the system of any use in research or education. The primary source of data for the VRML karst world is hand measurements of the entrance of the Abercrombie cave system.

The datathat is availble for the Jenolan caves is in the form of an eight-pointed polyhedron having six planar surfaces. This is useful in obtaining an impression of the cave system but does not convey the texture of the cave walls and roof with the many spectacular stalictites, staligmites and other cave formations that exist in these caves.

The paper presents the development of a prototype system constructed at CSU that uses an internet window into the ecological database system. The system provides retrieval of information as well as providing a multimedia window into the Karst system.

[more information]

[other authors]
Brad Curry

[keywords]
Karst system, virtual worlds, environmental, cave systems, database