Marc Rioux, Canada | ISBN: | Submitted: Jun 19, 1998

How to Virtualize Reality:An Application to the Reconstruction of World Heritage Sites

Virtual reality systems (VR) are increasingly being used for industrial, medical, and educational training applications, to name a few. In many of these applications, the truthful representation of the environment and the accurate manipulation and navigation in the virtual world are crucial. These systems are called Virtualized Reality Systems and differ from standard VR by the fact that the digital simulation model is created and updated from sensor data.
In this paper, we will describe such a system which integrates technologies in the field of Virtual Reality, Real-time 3D graphic, sensor fusion, and 3-D range sensing. The main objectives of this paper are: To demonstrate that realistic digital simulation of environments and objects can be produced from the fusion of various sensors such as 3-D range sensors and video cameras; To present practical methods to display and interact with the virtualized environment; To present various solution to the latency problems generated by large digital models (>100 Mbytes) produced by the various sensors; To address the usefulness of such systems in realistic applications; In this presentation, we will describe the system developed from the point of view of hardware, software and content generation. We will also describe an application of this technology to the recreation of a world heritage site displayed in one of the first VR theater build at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

GRAPHIC: NONE

[more information]

[other authors]
John Taylor and Marc Rioux

[keywords]
Range Sensor, Virtual Reality, 3-D Graphics, World Heritage Sites