Exploring cultural heritage sites through space and time

Abstract

Traveling through a single virtual environment only tells part of the story; a particularly interesting aspect is to illustrate how an area has developed over time. This article presents a unified approach to illustrating four-dimensional data concerning a cultural heritage site. The proposed framework provides a semi-automatic approach to both reconstructing the environment and bringing all the time-dependent models into an intuitive visualization package. For each time period considered for reconstruction, the system requires a set of building footprint maps depicting the layout of the environment plus a few statistics. The statistics govern the construction of three-dimensional building models, allowing each building's architectural style, typical building height, and roof style to be altered. This information is automatically processed and converted into a form that can be visualized. By integrating high quality landmark buildings from laser scanning or interactive modelling packages into the automatically generated scene, the cultural heritage site is realized both in a spatial and temporal context. The visualization is achieved via a 4D navigable movie which is presented using two concrete implementations written using Flash and OpenGL. The OpenGL-based implementation allows a collection of 3DS Max scenes to be automatically visualized requiring only a set of camera paths identified by the user.