Challenges in Converting the Polish Topographic Database of Built-Up Areas into 3D Virtual Reality Geovisualization

ABSTRACT

Virtual reality (VR) is a display and control technology. VR creates artificial worlds of sensory experience or immerses the user in representations of real spatial environments that might otherwise be inaccessible by virtue of distance, scale, time or physical incompatibilities of the user and the environment. The idea of VR is not new the first instances of VR were created in 1960s. But despite this, the issue of using VR technology in the aspect of existing topographic databases has not yet been researched by cartographers. The experiment was carried out on the Polish topographic database (BDOT 10k) in scale 1:10 000 to identify challenges in converting built-up areas into 3D VR geovisualization. In this paper, the author describes main features of VR, advantages and disadvantages of the analysed 2D topographic database in the context of 3D geovisualization, cartographic principles which may be applied into VR.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality
• topographic database
• 3D geovisualization
• built-up areas
• BDOT 10k

Notes on the contributor

Łukasz Halik is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Cartography and Geomatics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His main research interest is on virtual and augmented reality 3D geovisualizations.

ORCID

Łukasz Halik http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2537-0468