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3D Technologies

The Virtual Theater

Visualization with il teatro virtuale of the Crypt of Santa Cristina, near Lecce, Italy - Click for full view

Il teatro virtuale is a mobile virtual environment designed for the visualization of high-resolution virtualized scenes and for visual data mining.

The mobility of this highly optimized system is one of its advantages for successful application in such fields as cultural heritage documentation. Various applications of this virtual environment to visualization (heritage applications, design and architecture) and visual data mining are in progress at various locations. For instance, the system is utilized to visualize the crypt of Santa Cristina, a medieval Byzantine crypt near Lecce (Italy), has been scanned by the SIBA of the University of Lecce in collaboration with NRC at high resolution with a laser range scanner, and texture-mapped, with photogrammetric techniques .

This scalable environment is characterized by its distributed asynchronous architecture which optimizes the rendering performances by distributing the graphical load over various graphical processing units. The various components of the virtual environment can then be configured with an XML file.

In stereo mode, two computers render the scene. The projection system is composed of two circularly polarized digital light processing (DLP) video projectors. Both rear and front polarized projection are supported.
In tiled wall display mode, the number of computers is equal to the number of flat screens required for the visual display. This highly optimized system can currently run on laptops.

The project il teatro virtuale began in January 2002, and is part of IIT-VIT’s ongoing research to provide scientific technologies and techniques to collaborative partners in other disciplines by employing its expertise in visual sensing and processing. In this project, IIT-VIT has been able to develop useful technology to solve problems in visual documentation of cultural heritage sites, industrial design and visual data mining in collaboration with such partners as:

SIBA (University of Lecce, Italy)
IRST-ITC (Trento, Italy)
Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy)
University of Pretoria (South Africa)
SITE (University of Ottawa)

Related NRC-IIT Publications

Research Contact

Jacques Domey
Group Leader
Visual Information Technology
NRC Institute for Information Technology
1200 Montreal Road
Building M-50, Room 341
Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Telephone: +1 (613) 993-2557
Fax: +1 (613) 952-0215
E-mail: Jacques.Domey@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Dr. Eric Paquet
Research Officer
Visual Information Technology
NRC Institute for Information Technology
1200 Montreal Road
Building M-50, Room 360
Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Telephone: +1 (613) 991-5035
Fax: +1 (613) 952-0215
E-mail: Eric Paquet

Business Contact

Charles Gauthier
Business Development Officer
Business Development Office, NCR
NRC Institute for Information Technology
1200 Montreal Road
Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Telephone: +1 (613) 993-2491
Fax: +1 (613) 952-7998
E-mail: Charles Gauthier