4D Cities

Frank Dellaert

Project Goal:

The goal is to explore the use of the 4D Cities technology being developed by Prof. Dellaert's group as the basis for dissemination via the web or through an Augmented Reality 4D Viewer.

Prof. Dellaert's group at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a prototype "4D Viewer" which allows online users to explore a collection of historical images in their 4D (spatial and temporal) context. The experience is probably best appreciated by trying out the pre-release viewer at http://4d-cities.cc.gatech.edu/atlanta

The implications of this type of interface and underlying 4D models for information access are profound. Time-varying 3D models can serve to pull together and index large collections of images pertaining to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or artifact over time. With the advent of powerful graphics processors (GPUs) on every desktop, interacting in three dimensions and time, a 4D interactive immersion in a collection of imagery, offers a radically different and much more powerful user experience than the one offered by the traditional search/browse paradigm.

The goal of the 4D cities component of this project is to extend the current 4D work to create an infrastructure to author and maintain a 4D database that can be used in a variety of projects, e.g., 4D Atlanta, 4D Seoul, 4D Manhattan, or, outside the urban settings, 4D Yellowstone.

There are myriad possibilities for viewing this type of time-and-space registered imagery on the web or in situ using AR. The online viewer can be thought of as a temporal-spatial photo viewer where the 3D viewpoint is moved to the location from which the photograph was taken.