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From real cities to virtual worlds using an open modular architecture

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Abstract

The technologies for the Web and virtual worlds are currently converging, but although there are some efforts made to integrate them with each other, they typically rely on technologies foreign to most Web developers. In this paper, we present a new open architecture that combines several emerging and established technologies to provide convenient tools for developing virtual worlds directly in the Web. These technologies are easy to learn and understand by the Web community and allow for quick prototyping. Overall the modular architecture allows virtual worlds to be developed more quickly and more widely deployed. Additionally, we demonstrate that creating an adequate virtual environment can be an easy task when applying the principles of crowd-sourcing. We present an application that uses one of the largest available open data sources of geospatial information to bring 3D cities from the real world into the virtual environment.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Embodied Agents Research Group that has kindly provided an Amber model for the user’s avatar. Also, we would like to thank the many contributors of OpenStreetMap, who have provided high-quality data enabling us to generate a 3D version of our world based on their data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Sergiy Byelozyorov

  2. DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Rainer Jochem

  3. Saarland University and MMCI, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Vincent Pegoraro

  4. Saarland University and DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Philipp Slusallek

Authors
  1. Sergiy Byelozyorov
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  2. Rainer Jochem
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  3. Vincent Pegoraro
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  4. Philipp Slusallek
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sergiy Byelozyorov.

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Byelozyorov, S., Jochem, R., Pegoraro, V. et al. From real cities to virtual worlds using an open modular architecture. Vis Comput 29, 141–153 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-012-0717-9

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