Visualizing realistic 3D urban environments
Aaron Lee, Tuolin Chen, Michael Brünig, Hauke Schmidt · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2003
Visualizing complex urban environments has been an active research topic due to its wide variety of applications in city planning: road construction, emergency facilities planning, and optimal placement of wireless carrier base stations. Traditional 2D visualizations have been around for a long time but they only provide a schematic line-drawing bird's eye view and are sometimes confusing to understand due to the lack of depth information. Early versions of 3D systems have been developed for very expensive graphics workstations which seriously limited the availability. In this paper we describe a 3D visualization system for a desktop PC which integrates multiple resolutions of data and provides a realistic view of the urban environment.