The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST (2011) Short and Project Papers M. Dellepiane, F. Niccolucci, S. Pena Serna, H. Rushmeier, and L. Van Gool (Editors) The V-City Project J. Himmelstein 1 O. Balet 1 F. Ganovelli 2 E. Gobbetti 3 , M. Specht 5 P. Mueller 5 C. Engels 4 L. van Gool 4 J.B. de la Rivière 6 A. Cavazzini 7 1 Diginext, France 2 Visual Computing, ISTI-CNR, Italy 3 Visual Computing, CRS4, Italy 4 KU Leuven, Belgium 5 Procedural, Inc., Switzerland 6 Immersion SAS, France 7 BlomCGR, Italy Abstract 3D geoinformatics have entered the digital age, hesitantly in some areas, and rampantly in others. Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth are household names. However, these projects are limited to textured 3D landscapes, aerial 2D images and a few boxy building envelopes. The V-City project is a European research initiative to surpass these limitations, and create a system for intuitively exploring large urban areas with a high degree of detail. Bringing together technologies from geoinformatics, virtual reality, computer graphics, and computer vision, the system constructs detailed 3D city models from geopositioned aerial images and building footprints. For networked browsing, city models are compressed and streamed for interactive viewing of entire landscapes. A unique tactile table has also been developed to let multiple users visualize the same city model in stereo 3D, and interact with it simultaneously using hand gestures. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): H.5.1 [HCI]: Multimedia Information Systems— 1. Introduction In the cultural heritage (CH) domain, virtual reality is rec- ognized for its ability to transport users directly within a vir- tual environment, including 3D reconstructions of modern cities. At the same time, the data available about cities is both more numerous and of higher quality, including building footprints, elevation models, and both satellite and aerial im- agery. However, high-quality reconstructions can typically only be achieved manually, and with great effort. Visualizing entire cities at interactive rates, especially from a bird’s-eye view, is also a challenge. Finally, both virtual reality and GIS tools are usually designed for use by individuals instead of groups. In contrast, many cultural heritage researchers work collaboratively, and promoting their work involves showing their results to large numbers of people. The V-City research project † has been funded by the Eu- ropean Commission to address these challenges by enabling automatic reconstructions of entire cities, and visualization of these reconstructions in a collaborative manner, either via † vcity.diginext.fr the web browser or through a tactile and stereoscopic ta- ble for multiple users. This short project paper provides an overview the results obtained. 2. Related Work Our system combines and extends state-of-the-art solu- tions for reconstruction, visualization and exploration of detailed large-scale urban environments. Covering related work in all of these areas is beyond the scope of this short paper. We refer the reader to recent surveys on mod- eling urban spaces [VAW * 10], massive model visualiza- tion [eYGKM08], and individual and group support in table- top interaction [MTNP * 10] for more details. Concerning system integration efforts, there are at least two major sys- tems described in the recent literature that aim to sup- port reconstruction, navigation and analysis of 3D cities. The Autodesk LandXplorer system was used to create a virtual model of modern Berlin [DKL * 06]. It contained components for automatic and manual building reconstruc- tion based on aerial photography, visualization on a large- screen projector, and editing 3D landmarks. There was no focus on collaborative or immersive interfaces, however. MapCube, the automatically constructed 3D models of ma- c  The Eurographics Association 2011.