E. Freund, J. Rossmann 285 Integrating Robotics and Virtual Reality with Geo-Information Technology: Chances and Perspectives Eckhard Freund, Jürgen Rossmann Institute of Robotics Research (IRF) University of Dortmund {freund | rossmann}@irf.de ABSTRACT Recent advances in robotics and virtual reality technology have made possible the close- to-reality generation of virtual worlds with multiple agents acting almost as realistically as their real-world counterparts. In order to make these virtual worlds even more realis- tic, the next step surely is, not to build only artificial and closed virtual environments but rather to embrace the outdoors, i.e. to use geo-information technology to be able to build virtual worlds in a larger scale from real world data. INTRODUCTION By developing the capability to automatically generate 3D models from data provided by a web-mapping server and to enhance these rather static models by interactive metaphors representing features delivered by a web- feature server, we are trying to build the bridge between advanced 2D geo- information services and modern virtual reality applications. First steps to integrate robotics know-how with geo-information technology have already been taken by enhancing a forest machine simulator in the way that the vir- tual forest the machine is working in, may be generated on-line, based on a topographic map, as shown in Fig. 1. Of course, compared to the physical landscape, the resulting 3D world lacks considerable detail but this is mainly due to the fact that such detail cannot be derived form a simple 2D map. This is why our hopes lie with new geo-information services and ap- proaches which make available location based properties and attributes over defined web interfaces. For example, only the possibilities to find out about the viability of paths, the structure and tree types of the forest and the size and shape of buildings would already greatly enhance the 3D represen- tation.