Application of virtual reality in ecological farmland navigating system

Abstract

Scientific visualization is a powerful and popular technique and is very useful in many areas of science and engineering. It mainly uses computer graphics to view or explore three-dimensional (3D) objects, natural phenomenon, or numerical data. Virtual reality (VR) is an application of scientific visualization and is getting popular for applications associated with high-performance computing. To help Council of Agriculture, Taiwan (COA), promote the importance of farmland conservation, and to help elementary education authorities on basic agricultural, ecological education, in this study, a 3D virtual environment is developed to demonstrate the virtual farmland theme and associated temporal and spatial data and information. The system features (1) construction and visualization of the virtual farmland environment, (2) speedup and animation of the embedded objects, (3) multimedia effects, (4) display of the numerical analysis results of crops growing affected by nitrogen in land simulated by 2DSOIL model, sand (5) display of the numerical analysis results of groundwater flow and nitrogen transport in the farmland simulated by GMS-FEMWATER. Several computer graphics accelerating schemes, such as space partition, view frustum culling (VFC), billboard, and collision detection, were used to speedup the rendering. Users can immerse, navigate and interact with objects in the 3D virtual farmland ecology environment.