Italy

Parts of the world will become virtualized as time and people arise to tackle them.  If you are working on any particular location and are willing to be listed here, please let us know!

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Data

• Istituto Geografico Militare (IGMI) is the official agency, which licenses some data at reasonable cost, including 20m DEMs
• 3DCarto distributes "for all Italian territory, Orthophoto, Aerials and DTM" ready for use in their software
• Il Lupo sells 2D/3D map software which appears to do some realtime terrain rendering
• a contact: Charles Macmillan (charlesmacmillan@hotmail.com), looking at large datasets of northern Italy and of Austria, combining DEMs with satellite imagery
• UltraSoft3D's Territorio italiano 3D VRML
  • A nifty web utility (in Italian) for browsing to any part of Italy in a 2D map browser, then converting that area of the terrain to a VRML output file.  I found it easy to use, although of course suffering from the drawbacks of VRML (file size, syntax errors reported, difficult navigation, etc.)
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Places

• The Ultramundum project has modelled some places in Italy
  • Project descriptions exist for San Carlo square, entire city of Turin in 3D, Zappata park, Turin province, Aosta roman city in 1st century AC
  • Their goal is eventually to model all of Italy.
  • However, all the projects say "The Foundation can arrange interactive demonstrations on request, because this product can not be freely distributed yet."
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  • Actually, one scene is downloable: 3D interactive model of Turin, home of the 2006 olympic winter games.
  • A very early alpha version of their software is available from their download page.
  • Apparently these are part of a much larger, more ambitious project called 4DGea, which says "Any place on Earth will be explorable and it will be possible to visit it not only in three dimensions but in any period of the past... 4DGea will became the greatest work ever done by mankind, a four-dimensional book whose pages will contain everything we know of our history, everything of our science, everything of our culture, everything about our endless adventure."
• Rome Reborn
  • An ongoing project (1997-2007) by teams at the University of Virginia, UCLA and Politecnico di Milano, to create a 3D model of the ancient city of Rome.  The notional date of the model is 320 AD.  The primary purpose of the model is to present information and theories about how the city looked at that moment in time, roughly the peak of its development as the capital of the Roman Empire.
  • related projects Digital Roman Forum, Aquae Urbis Romae
  • news releases:
    • June 11, 2007: Launch of IATH's New Digital Model of Ancient Rome
    • June 14, 2007: 'Rome Reborn' Model Pushes Frontiers of 3-D Simulation - "Demonstration ran on a $2500 Shuttle PC equipped with a 1.5-Gb NVidia graphics card at 30 fps."
• Sardegna3D
  • A free Windows application which gives a flyover of the island of Sardinia, similar to a simplified Google Earth.
  • Actually, compared to GE, the elevation is more accurate, but the imagery worse, the paging is slower, and there are no cities or other culture.
  • Here are side-by-side images showing the same place (on the island of Tavolara) in Sardegna3D vs. GE:
     
  • I don't read Italian so i'm not certain what the purpose of this software is; it doesn't seem to have any culture or to be open for any use besides flyover.
• The city of Magnago (in Milano Province) was modelled by tecnolution as "Magnago Virtuale", an experiment of urban simulation on a small/medium scale, created in conjunction with the city center renovation project.  Interestingly, they provide several different ways to view the model:
  • VRML, built on the Cortona VRML Client
  • panning over a large pre-rendered 3D view, using Flash
  • panning around in pre-rendered panoramic views, using Flash
  • rendered video of walking around the model, using Flash
    
• VRInternal 3D interactive created architecture VRML models of two places in Milan: palazzo Bovara and Piazza del Doumo:
  
• GeoSim Systems created a model of a small part of Milan, although it's unclear who owns the resulting model
• the Virtual Heritage Lab of CNR-ITABC has projects modeling some Italian sites including interactive virtual models of Appia Antica, Cappella degli Scrovegni, and Pompeii
  
• Google 3D Warehouse Cities in Development: Firenze, Roma

Websites

• Italy eXplorer
  • Website with an embedded interactive flyover of all of Italy
  • Uses nicely cleaned-up public data for elevation, imagery, and point locations for cities
  • Andrea Caporin explains: "The DEM data are SRTM data, interpolated to cover the voids and resampled to about 250m to improve the visualization speed.  The textures are obtained by LandSat ETM+ scenes (PAN+TM), with final resolution of 15 m.  I worked very much with Global Mapper and then with Photoshop."
  • Built on the Blaxxun VRML control which unfortunately means that it is Windows and IE only, and must do paging in a very blocky, chunky fashion (huge pops)
  • Navigation is smooth and easy, although very constrained (fixed elevation, no pitch) which is appropriate for novice visitors