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monumental landscapes [1]. By controlling light effects and turning physical stage
sets, the device gave striking panoramas that swiftly switched between day and night
and between different time periods. Its smaller variant has been widely adopted as a
museum displaying tool for collected objects in an artificial scene. The recently
developed 3D GIS and virtual reality methods provide an opportunity to create a
digital variant of the diorama to contextualize spatial objects in a virtual geographic
environment (VGE) with flexible controls to alter the viewer's position and the
contents of the environment [2].
Digital diorama has several advantages over the original diorama: (1) a large
physical space to store the contents is unnecessary, even for modelling a large
geographic environment; (2) the contents can be easily edited or replaced for various
purposes; (3) the system is open to other databases so that any set of digital contents
can be linked to geographic positions; and (4) the virtual environment can be shared
through networks, particularly the Internet.
In this study, we aim to explore the possibility of using a set of digital dioramas of
the Japanese historical city Kyoto, called Virtual Kyoto [3], as a digital platform to
enhance information sharing of the arts and culture of Kyoto as well as encouraging
the discussion on the future of this historical city and its rich cultural heritage. Virtual
Kyoto was created as a GIS-based VGE of the past and present historical urban
spaces in the city by constructing a large amount of geotemporal-referenced 3D
models of cityscape elements from different ages. So far, our published studies [4-6]
have mainly focused on the restoration and modelling of historical landscapes using
various modern and historical sources of geographic information. Such efforts of
restoring the past can be regarded as a virtual journey through memories of this great
historical city. We here take up the ideas and methods of the digital diorama Virtual
Kyoto, to retrieve and assemble information on the arts and culture of Kyoto and
apply it to planning considerations of the city's future landscape.
This Virtual Kyoto project has been a part of the 'Kyoto Art Entertainment
Innovation Research (2002-2006)' undertaken at Ritsumeikan University under
the auspices of the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) program funded by the
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The
program is now managed by the Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Cultures and
Arts under the Global COE program (2007-2011). In accordance with the recent trend
to use new-generation digital recording techniques for chronicling cultural heritages
[7], a large amount of digitally archived materials from the arts and culture sector
have been accumulated through these programs, including collections of digitalized
fine arts, scanned old maps, laser-scanned floats, CAD models of existing historical
buildings, and motion captured traditional artistic performance, e.g. 'Noh' and
'Kabuki'. Virtual Kyoto was originally intended to be a platform for integrating such
various digitalised contents for contextualizing them in geographic locations (Fig. 1).
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We provide a brief explanation of the
construction of Virtual Kyoto in section 2. Then, section 3, we describe a method to
use Virtual Kyoto for constructing a new online digital museum interface with
geographic data-linkages to the numerous historical and cultural digital contents
including information on culturally valued landscapes. Then, we explore possibilities
of using landscape simulations and GIS-data overlays to discuss the future of the
historical city of Kyoto and the effect of city planning activities such as landscape
policies (section 4) or the possible damage due to disasters on the historical
landscapes (section 5).
