Abstract

A trip through a virtual world is a powerful metaphor and a natural wayofinteracting with a geographic information system (GIS). Virtual reality (VR) systems provide visual realism and real-time navigation and interaction for data in core, but fail to cope with very large amounts of data, and to provide the general functionality of information systems. We describe a prototype system that overcomes these problems by coupling two platforms: A client that runs the VR componentinteracts 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 howtointegrate a geometric index into the database, and how to perform the operations that are requested in a real-time trip through the virtual world.

Citations