Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Present
Edo Era
-Early modern-
(ca. 17-19
th
C)
Heian Era
(ca. 8-12
th
C)
Fig. 2.
Digital dioramas of Virtual Kyoto at present and in two historical eras
3 Digital Museum of Kyoto Arts and Culture on Web-Based
Digital Diorama
Following the original intention of the Virtual Kyoto project, we currently maintain a
web-site using the 3D web-GIS engine, UrbanViewer
TM
for Web (CAD Center, Ltd.),
to disseminate the digital diorama contents of Kyoto with links to other digital
archives of Kyoto arts and culture. The URL of the site is as follows:
http://www.geo.lt.ritsumei.ac.jp/uv4w/frame_e.jsp
Like GoogleEarth (Google Inc.) and Virtual Earth (Microsoft Inc.), the engine
enables us to transmit and receive a great amount of 3D landscape information
including buildings, landforms and textured images with interactive manipulation of
view settings on ordinary DSL-level-speed internet infrastructure by LOD (level of
detail), data compression and streaming techniques of smoothed images. LOD is a
technique that is widely used for virtual reality to control in real time the quality of
3D models' display. It automatically changes the display/non-display of 3D objects
and also displays the object's geometry and texture images with the appropriate data
amount and resolution according to the distance between the client and the viewed
objects and the client's viewing angles.
To reduce the amount of data to be transmitted, a simple way of data reduction is
used on extruded building models that often occupy a large space in a view. This
