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various geographical information from different historical eras. This unique feature
has been crucial from the outset as the goals of the Virtual Kyoto project were
focused on depicting the history of the city, as well as reconstructing the city's past
urban landscape. Compared to Digital City Kyoto, Virtual Kyoto does not currently
provide a general social interaction platform but it is expected to facilitate public-
participation for collecting and sharing the information on arts and culture of Kyoto,
and eventually to contribute to create an environment for better everyday living in
Kyoto.
In Virtual Kyoto we have adopted MAPCUBE® data from CAD Center, Increment P
and Pasco, Ltd., for creating the present landscape modelling. The data consists of
prismatic 3D building block models based on the building footprint and height for the
whole city of Kyoto (Fig. 1). The 3D models are created by extruding the building
footprint to the height obtained by an air-borne laser-profiler which recorded height
values at an interval of 2.5 m with an error within 15 cm (http://www.mapcube.
jp/en/product.html). We replaced the simple extruded building model, 'white model',
with detailed CAD models with photo realistic texture images for buildings regarded as
landmarks in the historical Kyoto landscape, such as world heritage temples and shrines.
An important aspect of Kyoto rises from the fact that the city, founded in 794 AD,
was the historical capital of Japan and still retains a large number of historical
architecture such as temples, shrines, machiya, and modern western-style buildings of
the pre-war period. This is a rare case in Japan; the city managed to escape damages
during World War II. Our strategy in restoring historical Kyoto involves the
modelling of present day Kyoto as a virtual city, then replacing the newer buildings
with traditional buildings as we go back in time. For this purpose, various sources of
past landscapes including aerial photos or old maps, landscape drawings and paintings
were collected and georeferenced in a GIS environment. For restoring the early
landscape of ancient Kyoto called Heian-kyo (ca. 8
th
-12
th
centuries), landscape
modelling was independently conducted by following blue-prints of physical
miniatures of the Heian-kyo diorama that were made to mark the 1200
th
anniversary
of the founding of the city in 1994. Fig. 2 demonstrates 3D sceneries portraying many
geographical objects at three different eras in Virtual Kyoto (see [3,4,5,6] for details
on the modelling procedure of these geographic environments). For the landscape
visualisation, we employed UrbanViewer
TM
(CAD Center, Ltd.), a virtual reality
desktop application for real-time viewing of detailed urban scenes using a 3D urban
model of MAPCUBE®.
We have thus created the digital diorama of Kyoto as a 4D GIS environment (3D
space plus time dimension) of Kyoto landscape elements. This supports a number of
new areas of geographic inquiry, especially with its ability to represent the implications
of historical changes in landscape on the city's current and future policies.
Virtual Kyoto comprises the following four functions: (a) archiving georeferenced
materials such as current digital maps, old topographic maps, cadastral maps, aerial
photos, picture maps, street photos, landscape paintings, archaeological sites data, and
historical documents; (b) creating a database of all existing buildings including
machiya, early modern buildings, and shrines and temples including those of
historical and cultural significance; (c) creating 3D models of the buildings mentioned
above; and (d) estimating and simulating land use and landscape changes over the
study periods using the aforementioned materials.
