Dynamic Mapping of Raster-Data for 3D Geovirtual Environments

Interactive 3D geovirtual environments (GeoVE), such as 3D virtual city and landscape models, are important tools to communicate geo-spatial information. Usually, this includes static polygonal data (e.g., digital terrain model) and raster data (e.g., aerial images) which are composed from multiple data sources during a complex, only partial automatic pre-processing step. When dealing with highly dynamic geo-referenced raster data, such as the propagation of fires or floods, this pre-processing step hinders the direct application of 3D GeoVE for decision support systems. To compensate for this limitation, this paper presents a concept for dynamically mapping multiple layers of raster for interactive GeoVE. The implementation of our rendering technique is based on the concept of projective texture mapping and can be implemented efficiently using consumer graphics hardware. Further, this paper demonstrates the flexibility of our technique using a number of typical application examples.