Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 13, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Many buildings today are no longer designed on a drawing board, but with computer-aided design software. What has been missing until now is a realistic, interactive representation of buildings in their future surroundings. Computer scientists in Saarbrücken have developed a visualization technology that allows architects to fit complex building models perfectly into the landscape.
Scientists from Saarland University and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) plan to present the new technology as an interactive 3D cinema at CeBIT 2009 in Hanover from March 3 to 8 at Saarland’s research stand (Hall 9, Stand B43).
To simulate landscapes realistically on a computer, the Saarbrücken researchers use information from land-registry offices, together with photographs and terrain data captured by airborne laser scanners. Typically providing five measurement points per square meter, these sources deliver a highly accurate dataset. The data is then assembled on a computer into virtual villages and cities within the corresponding three-dimensional terrain. On a monitor or stereoscopic screen, users can rotate the buildings in three dimensions, fly around them or walk through their interiors. If a new building’s design does not fit its surroundings or casts a shadow over a neighbor’s garden, it can be changed quickly with a mouse click. Thanks to the three-dimensional, true-to-life representation of the surroundings, architects and landscape planners could avoid expensive plaster models in future.
The precise images are based on real-time ray tracing, an interactive visualization technology brought to market readiness in recent years by Professor Philipp Slusallek and his team. It opens new virtual worlds to designers and engineers in which mirrors, reflections and refractions are also rendered realistically. For the CeBIT 2009 presentations, the computer-graphics researchers modeled Saarland University’s campus and integrated the new computer-science buildings and a planned extension to DFKI. Wearing 3D glasses, trade-fair visitors can explore the campus interactively on a large screen.
In a further research project, the Saarbrücken computer scientists are working on integrating semantic information into virtual maps. Municipalities, for example, maintain many databases covering roads, traffic signs, sewage pipes and even trees. Until now, these have been represented in 3D maps only as symbols rather than in their actual geometry. New visualization methods are to be researched to display these data in the 3D environment. Semantic information could also be used, for example, to portray how historic buildings changed over the decades.
On March 3, Professor Philipp Slusallek will give a future-talk lecture titled “Our World in the Computer: Simulated Reality Instead of Second Life” in Hall 9, Stand A54. Professor Slusallek’s new “Agents and Simulated Reality” research group at DFKI is developing this 3D technology in cooperation with the university’s Cluster of Excellence and applying it in various industrial and research projects.
