18 June 2012

Walking through the baroque fortress town of Saarlouis

Ilustration of the fortified town of Saarlouis interactive 3D model (Source: DFKI)

Computer scientists from Saarbrücken, Germany, digitized views of the baroque fortress town of Saarlouis and combine it in a historical 3D-world. The city museum has already installed a terminal, through which the visitors can explore the model on their own, as well as a produced 20 minutes long video. Parts of the model will be soon available online.

Three years ago, the development teams presented to the public a first model, which has served as the basis for various applications of the printed material to build the interactive stereoscopic 3D world.  The team came together in 2008 to work on the production of the film "Saarlouis - a splendid Baroque city. Since then, computer scientists of the University of the Saarland and members the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence worked on a computer model of the historic town that can now be made available in a user friendly interface.  The new museum terminal has now been installed after two years of preparation and it shows the historic town of about 1700 and around 1870 AD.

Furthermore, there was also produced a 20-minute film, that shows the emergence of the French fortress and the Prussian changes over the period of 170 years. The film is accompanied by an explanatory text and illustrations from historical documents in the form of maps and graphics.

In order to make possible de 3D display on the museum´s website, a news scene description language, XML3D, has been developed by researchers from Saarbrücken and the Professor Slusallek. This new language allows directly 3D scenes embedding into any web page.  Besides Museums, this XML3D can also allow multiple online applications to use 3D in easy and non-expensive way, as  the technology can be used without extensive programming knowledge. 

More info: http://www.viscenter.de/ and The museum website 

Watch an excerpt from the video: