VR Geo — Planning Tool for the Redevelopment of Landscape

Abstract

This report describes in more detail a project applying VR as a planning tool for the redevelopment of landscape. The aim of the project was to visualize redevelopment projects of two sites of the company Wismut GmbH [4], a former mining company.

Applying VR technology, both the actual and the planning state of the landscape can be visualized interactively. The visualization of the planning state includes also the several processes (e.g., leveling and deposit) which will be carried out through the redevelopment.

With the VR Geo system the engineers of Wismut were able to plan these two redevelopment projects in a powerful manner. They visualized the various planning states and discussed them with decision-maker. Furthermore the results were presented to people who are living in this area. They got a first impression of how their region will look in future.

This report describes not just another VR application. It describes the realization of a project which provides the customer with a system to generate, to change, and to present a landscape in different states. In fact the most difficult problem was to generate, i.e. to model, the landscape based upon the different kind of original data: hard copies of 2D maps, a lot of textual information, color photos and some digital data (3D point and line data of the dumps, grey scale aerial photo of the landscape). All the remaining has been modeled during the project: topology of the landscapes, streets, trees, bushes, buildings, dumps, railway tracks, fences, pits, churches, a location line for the trucks to level one dump, etc.

The next difficulty was the different kind of user requirements. The system should be integrated into the daily work to support the engineers in planning redevelopment projects. Furthermore the redevelopment projects should be presented using a high end and a low end VR environment: high end VR workstation, VR interaction devices, stereo large screen projection, low end graphics workstation. Third, the system should be able to produce on demand videos and color images based on the requirements of the customer. And fourth, the system should be open for future extensions.

To sum up the VR Geo system enables the engineers of Wismut to visualize redevelopment projects in a scalable manner: snapshots of the planned landscape as color images, videos of a flight through the landscape, interim results for discussion on a low end workstation, and a highly immersive presentation using a high end VR system. All alternatives have been applied during the project described within this paper.