Back to IEEE VR 2008 Workshops

Virtual Cityscapes: Key Research Issues in Modeling Large-Scale Immersive Urban Environments

Saturday March 8th, 8:30am - 5:00pm (full-day)
Sunday March 9th, 8:30am - 5:00pm (full-day)
Silver Legacy Resort Casino
Reno, Nevada

Introduction

Virtual Environments have provided a major breakthrough in the way humans work with computers. Current applications of virtual reality include flight simulators for military and commercial pilot training, cultural and tactic military training systems, the treatment of phobias, architectural design, image-guided planning and surgery, 3D nano-manipulation, and molecular docking. However, most existing applications focus on the use of VR for a single or a small number of users in a limited scope and does not capture more common and much richer urban scenes surrounding us. Modeling and simulating immersive urban landscape have applications in architectural design, city planning, virtual commerce, emergency response, personnel training, and many more.

See the workshop website at http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/VR08_Cityscapes/ for more information

Workshop Goals and Structure

The goal of the Virtual Cityscapes Workshop is to gather a multi-disciplinary collection of researchers to closely examine the key research issues required to model large-scale immersive urban environments and populate them with realistic virtual crowds and avatars with individuality and characteristics. Issues may include:

• Cityscape: what is the state-of-the-art in creating the basic virtual city (streets and buildings)? What technology is available for "geo-typical" and "geo-specific" and how do they differ? What is the cost of creating a Cityscape? What about mark-up?
• "People-scape": an urban environment is defined as much by the population as by the buildings. What technology is available for populating the city with virtual humans? How realistic can they be? How are they generated? Can cultural behavior be included?
• Applications: How much realism and fidelity of both cityscape and "peoples-scape" is required for different applications? Do some applications require physical detail beyond the basics, like weather, wind, litter, traffic, building interiors, functional objects like working traffic lights, sewers, mailboxes, telephones?
• Architecture and implementation: how may real humans can be effectively hosted in a virtual city? How can we scale that up? Should the community be working on open architectures to promote collaboration?

The workshop program will include invited talks on the current state-of-the-art or other topics, contributed presentations by the Workshop participants, panel discussion, and breakout sessions on sub-topics of interest.

Call for Participation

Virtual Cityscape Workshop participants who wish to present their views or recent research results must submit a position statement of up to 4 pages in length by Dec. 20, 2007 on some aspect of Virtual Cityscapes to Ming Lin <lin@cs.unc.edu>. The position statements will be reviewed by an international program committee based on the originality and research quality. All other workshop participants are also encouraged to submit 2-page reports documenting their experiences and lesson learned to be included in the workshop proceedings.