Zhi Gong, China | ISBN: | Submitted: Jun 23, 1998

Dunhuang Art Cave Presentation and preserve based on VE

*)This work is supported by National Science Foundation Key project of China. Dunhuang Art Cave, an unparalleled cave art museum in the world, is a famous heritage in the northwest of China. Unfortunately, it is being gradually damaged under the natural influence. It will be a difficult and significant engineering to represent, preserve restore and propagate the Dunhuang arts and culture. Therefore our work focuses on three main goals: the first is to combine some methods for preserving and representing the art into VE; the second is to develop aiding tools to support research and navigation based on VE; the last one is to exploring Dunhuang tourism resource.

We provide two kinds of systems according to different end-users respectively. One is oriented to low-end users, public users; another one is oriented to high-end user, Dunhuang researchers or artists. Now much work has been done in the virtual environment navigation using VR technology, especially in buildings recreating. But Dunhuang Art Cave is an art and culture representation more than just simple buildings. The system should completely model the real art caves and provide photo-realistic rendering for navigating; moreover it also provides visualization tools to support mural restoration and retrieval.

In this paper, we outline the Dunhuang Art Cave data model and basic system architecture. In developing the system, we have solved several technical issues: (1) An integrated cave modeling: we use solid-modeling methods to describe the regular cave space structure with texture mapping to represent the detail parts, while using image-based rendering approaches to represent the complicated painting sculptures with on-line rendering. Moreover, we adopt multi-level structure to represent both texture and 3D model to archiving good performance. (2) Multimedia information presentation: there is rich information included in Dunhuang Art Cave, so we develop a multimedia information model (including 3D model, images, documents, sounds and videos if necessary) for Dunhuang Art Cave to support navigating, browsing and interacting etc. (3) Real-time navigating methods: we provide two kinds of navigation ways: one allows user to freely walk in six free-degrees; another one allows user to walk along predefined path and allow user to jump among hot points. Both methods will provide interactive ability.

Presently, according to the cave architecture dimension and publications provided by Dunhuang Academy, we have developed the prototype systems, for both low-end and high-end computer respectively, to represent the No. 045 cave. The model is made of about ten thousands facets and 72 sets of photographs which are used to represent painting sculpture. We also provide several lighting models to simulate different environment. The results show that the approaches we have taken are quite effective.

[more information]

[other authors]
Dr.Dongming Lu, Prof.Yunhe Pan

[keywords]
virtual navigation, virtual environment, image-based rendering, 3D model-based rendering, multimedia information