From CAD to VR – focusing on urban planning and building design.

Paper in proceeding, 2004

The Virtual Reality (VR) technique appears to have a bright future even if its commercial use has not developed as expected. One of the reasons why VR has not yet succeeded on the market is the enormous cost and time of developing the models. Our experience is that the creation of the existing surroundings and terrain take up to much time of each such project. In this paper we are presenting a technique and software, MrViz, developed in-house based on Open Scene Graph for generating existing surroundings and terrain. The creation is automatically generated from the 3D information in The City Planning Authority 3D GIS database and aerial photos. Implementation problem of VR with the current building design process are also been discussed.