Bringing together UAS-based land surveying and procedural modelling of buildings to set up enhanced VR environments for cultural heritage

Abstract

A methodology to rapidly produce environments that combine the intuition of in situ augmented reality (AR) with the commodity of virtual reality (VR) is proposed in this paper, by bringing together unmanned aerial systems (UAS) imagery and procedural modelling. While fully synthesized environments provide a very accurate visualization of the conserved parts of the real-world, missing parts - namely ruins - can be complemented with procedurally modelled structures. Regarding methodology’s steps, firstly, a UAS flight mission gathers georeferenced imagery data about the site of interest. Then, the image set is converted to an accurate 3D model of the referred site, through photogrammetry. By considering the geographic information that also results from the previous process, ruins are manually outlined for georeferencing purposes. To complement ruins’ missing information, virtual models of buildings are produced too, in a procedural modelling tool. Finally, at the full VR environment setup step, all elements are imported and subjected to geometric transformations that aim to match the procedurally modelled buildings with the outlined ruins. To improve the insight about the process work-flow, system’s architecture and implementation are presented along with a case-study regarding a historically relevant site - Vila Velha’s city gates (Vila Real, Portugal) - and preliminary results.