The Alps at Your Fingertips: Virtual Reality and Geoinformation Systems

We advocate a desktop virtual reality (VR) interface to a geographic information system (GIS). The navigational capability to explore large topographic scenes is a powerful metaphor and a natural way of interacting with a GIS. VR systems succeed in providing visual realism and realtime navigation and interaction, but fail to cope with very large amounts of data and to provide the general functionality of information systems. We suggest a way to overcome these problems. We describe a prototype system that integrates two system platforms: A client that runs the VR component interacts via a (local or wide area) network with a server that runs an object oriented database containing geographic data. For the purpose of accessing data efficiently, we describe how to integrate a geometric index into the database, and how to perform the operations that are requested in a real-time trip through the virtual world.