Virtual Kyoto Project: Digital Diorama of the Past, Present, and Future of the Historical City of Kyoto - Culture and Computing - page 178

reduction method stores the geometry data as the polygon of its base shape and height
instead of the polygons of all the surfaces. In order to achieve smooth real-time
display of the texture images, different resolutions of the images as well as digital
terrain models are stored in the database server. According to the distances between
the viewing positions and viewed objects, and the client's viewing angles, the web
server orders the database server to extract the image data with the most appropriate
resolution for the client's view and the extracted image data are sent to the client's
PC. For browsing through a website constructed by the engine, a client is required to
use Microsoft Internet Explorer with the UrbanViewer TM for Web plug-in installed.
In the web-based digital diorama of Virtual Kyoto, users can freely fly over or walk
through landscapes of Kyoto at different times (present, early 20 th century, and 12 th
century). Fig. 3 shows an example of such an instant virtual time-travel as viewed on
the web. A pair of views using the same viewing position and angle but showing
scenes at different time periods vividly demonstrate how one could feel the sense of
the ancient landscape around Heian-kyu, the rectangular ancient imperial palace that
was built at the beginning of Heian-kyo in late 8 th century, and which was largely
transformed into the current built-up areas with irregular skylines of buildings. We
Present
(21 st C)
Senbon-Dori
Heian Era
(12 th C)
Suzaku-Ohji
Fig. 3. Virtual time-travel of Kyoto landscape on web