SCORE - Scene COmplexity REduction for Real-Time 3D Environments
by Boris Groth, Juan Carlos Escudero and Roberto Scopigno
In the context of the bilateral agreement for scientific collaboration
between the German National Research Centre for Information Technology
(GMD), Germany, and the Italian National Research Council (CNR),
Italy, signed on 16 December 1997, the institutes of FIRST in
Berlin and CNUCE and IEI in Pisa are now working jointly on a
project for the automatic acquisition and real time 3D visualisation
of artistic and cultural data.
A realistic and intriguing virtual visit of the Guggenheim Museum
in Bilbao (Spain) aroused considerable interest when it was shown
recently (June, 1988) to the visitors of the German Museum of
Science and Technology in Bonn. This demonstration program is
the first, relevant result of the recently set-up scientific co-operation
between FIRST-GMD , CNUCE-CNR and IEI-CNR.
The museum is a modern building with complex and futurist shapes.
The 3D NURBS-based model of the museum, courtesy of Urbetipo,
Bilbao (Spain), was converted into a data representation based
on triangular meshes and then simplified using Jade 2.0, a surface
simplifier developed jointly by CNUCE-CNR and IEI-CNR in Pisa.
Surface simplification was performed in order to drastically reduce
rendering times. FIRST was responsible for developing the system
for real time virtual navigation of the museum (collision detection
handling, texture mapping, realistic rendering, etc.).
This result represents just the first step of the more articulated
and complex project SCORE (Scene COmplexity REduction for Real-Time
3D Environments); in the near future participation in the project
will be extended to other institutions of the European Union.
The goal of SCORE is the development and integration of technologies
for the automatic acquisition (ie, gathering data in digital form),
management (ie, cataloguing, archiving, simplification of geometric
models), and exploitation (visualisation and manipulation) of
three-dimensional model databases. The artistic and historical
artefacts acquired will cover a wide spectrum (from architectural
complexes to sculptures, from pottery to jewellery, etc.) and
therefore will require the tuning of adequate techniques for data
acquisition and processing. Adequate real-time authoring and visualisation
environments will be built for evaluation of the project results
with different examples of architectural and cultural heritage
models.
SCORE especially deals with the optimisation of the process to
transform CAD-data, NURBS-based models, or 3D cultural heritage
objects acquired by range scanners into real-time 3D-databases
and appropriate handling of scene complexity within interactive
visualisation environments. SCORE relates to other GMD-FIRST research-projects
in aspects of adequate I/O devices like HMD’s, Trackers, etc.
(FACIT) for convenient interaction techniques, possibilities of
remote rendering for low-end platforms (ESRA, GO-WEB), hardware
supported high-quality visualisation (VISA+), repository based
scene decomposition and CSCW support (PIROL), and to other CNR
special research projects aimed at the preservation of the cultural
heritage and simplified multiresolution 3D data representation
(CNR Project ‘Safeguard of Cultural Heritage’).
Please contact:
Boris Groth - GMD
Tel: +49 30 6392 1782
E-mail: Boris.Groth@gmd.de
Roberto Scopigno - IEI-CNR
Tel: +39 050 593304
E-mail: r.scopigno@cnuce.cnr.it
Juan Carlos Escudero - Urbetipo, Bilbao
Tel: +34 4 416 06 61
E-mail: urbetipo@cimv.es
