The goal of the project was to reconstruct a complex 3D model of an urban
environment, in particular the Viennese Josefsplatz and the State Hall of the
Austrian National Library (Prunksaal), from historical pictures and paintings
and present this 4D information space (3D geometry over time) on PCs and mobile
devices. Moreover, a user adaptive meta-information system enables the
visualisation of complex, interlinked historic events. A special focus is set
on the different qualities of historical information. In the project, OFAI
concentrated on the realization of the meta-information system and the
generation of tours through the virtual environments according to user
interests.
At OFAI, we developed a system to automatically extract information from various types of legacy documents in order to populate a knowledge base containing items of interest such as pieces of text, images, videos, along with their metadata (time and epoch, content category, links to related data, etc.). We implemented a set of web services (using mod_perl) in order to find and display presentation objects from the database according to the user's position, device (desktop or mobile), interests, and the time interval selected in the interface. Several modes of presentation are available, using stylesheets and speech synthesis to cater to different display resolutions and modalities. Our module for generating virtual tours assembles a sequence of presentation objects depending on the user's preferences and viewing history, guiding the user through the environment. The tours combine different media, combining speech output with the display of images linked from the original texts in time-aligned slideshow overlayed on the 3d image of the historical sites. In the project, I was responsible for most of the implementation, and management of interfaces, changes and new features with our project partners at VRVis, FTW and ÖNB.
