Mapping cityscapes to cyber space

Abstract

This work establishes a cyber space of an urban area for visiting on the Internet. By registering entire scenes along every street and scenes at many locations, people can visually travel from street to street, and reach their destinations in cyber city. The issues we discuss here are how to map a large scale area to image domain in a small amount of data, how to cover visual information as complete as possible in the mapping, and how to effectively display the captured scenes for various activities in cyber city. Route Panoramas captured along streets and Panoramic Views captured at widely open sites are associated to city maps to provide a navigation function. This paper focuses on the properties of our extended images - route panorama, the archiving process applied to an urban area, and a real environment we developed to transmit and display scenes on the WWW and portable devices. The created cyber spaces of real cities have broad applications such as city tour, real estate, E-commerce, heritage preservation, urban planning and construction.