Multi-Perspective Detail+Overview Visualization for 3D Building Exploration

Virtual 3D building models, as key elements of virtual 3D city models, are used in a growing number of application domains, such as geoanalysis, disaster management and architectural planning. Visualization systems for such building models often rely on perspective or orthogonal projections using a single viewpoint. Therefore, the exploration of a complete model requires a user to change the viewpoint multiple times and to memorize the content of each view to obtain a comprehensive mental model. Since this is usually a time-consuming task, which implies context switching, current visualization systems use multiple viewports to simultaneously depict an object from different perspectives. Our approach extends the idea of multiple viewports by combining two linked views for the interactive exploration of virtual 3D buildings model and their façades. In contrast to traditional approaches, we automatically generate a multi-perspective view that simultaneously depicts all façades of the building in one overview image. This facilitates the process of obtaining overviews and supports fast and direct navigation to various points-of-interest. We describe the concept and implementations of our Multiple-Center-of-Projection camera model for real-time multi-perspective image synthesis. Further, we provide insights into different interaction techniques for linked multi-perspective views and outline approaches of future work.