Authors:
Mel Krokos
1
;
Fabio Luca Bonali
2
;
Fabio Luca Vitello
3
;
Varvara Antoniou
4
;
Ugo Becciani
3
;
Elena Russo
2
;
Fabio Luca Marchese
2
;
Luca Fallati
2
;
Paraskevi Nomikou
4
;
Martin Kearl
5
;
Eva Sciacca
3
and
Malcolm Whitworth
6
Affiliations:
1
University of Portsmouth, School of Creative Technologies, Eldon Building, Winston Churchill Ave, Portsmouth, PO1 2UP, U.K, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Astrophysical Observatory of Catania and Italy
;
2
University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Piazza della Scienza 4 – Ed. U04, 20126 Milan and Italy
;
3
Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Astrophysical Observatory of Catania and Italy
;
4
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Geology and Geoenvironment, Panepistimioupoli Zografou, 15784 Athens and Greece
;
5
University of Portsmouth, School of Creative Technologies, Eldon Building, Winston Churchill Ave, Portsmouth, PO1 2UP and U.K
;
6
University of Portsmouth, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Burnaby Road, Portsmouth, PO1 3QL and U.K
Keyword(s):
Virtual Reality, Workflows, Visual Exploration and Discovery, Video Game Engines, Structure from Motion, Digital Terrain and Bathymetric Models.
Abstract:
This paper presents generic guidelines for constructing customised workflows exploiting game engine technologies aimed at allowing scientists to navigate and interact with their own virtual environments. We have deployed Unity which is a cross-platform game engine freely available for educational and research purposes. Our guidelines are applicable to both onshore and offshore areas (either separately or even merged together) reconstructed from a variety of input datasets such as digital terrains, bathymetric and structure from motion models, and starting from either freely available sources or ad-hoc produced datasets. The deployed datasets are characterised by a wide range of resolutions, ranging from a couple of hundreds of meters down to single centimetres. We outline realisations of workflows creating virtual scenes starting not only from digital elevation models, but also real 3D models as derived from structure from motion techniques e.g. in the form of OBJ or COLLADA. Our gui
delines can be knowledge transferred to other scientific domains to support virtual reality exploration, e.g. 3D models in archaeology or digital elevation models in astroplanetary sciences.
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