Models and Visualizations in a Virtual Habitat

The Earth is still rather „flat“. Therefore geographic data still tend to be two-dimensional and are stored in 2-dimensional information systems. But we do live in a three-dimensional world. In technical systems, the 3rd dimension has long been merely an attribute of 2-dimensional graphical data. This is subject to rapid change. Three-dimensional models of the human habitat are emerging. The required tools to create and use such models are the topic of the paper. This is at the intersection of computer graphics and computer vision and reflects a recent trend in computer science, where vision and graphics increasingly tend to meet. The paper discusses procedures for a fully automated creation of 3-dimensional models of today’s buildings and cities, but also of interior spaces, even of microscopic worlds and of the lost cities of the antique. Methods will be described, but also their performance, accuracies, limitations and costs, to better understand what it takes to create and use a „virtual habitat“.