Virtual Sardinia: a Hypermedia Fly-through with Real Data

The Virtual Sardinia project aims at collecting a large amount of heterogeneous data concerning the island of Sardinia and representing them in such a way that a casual user can easily navigate through them in a virtual trip. All these data are interconnected in an hypermedia way, browsable in the World-wide Web, ranging from geographic to archaeological data, from historical to touristical info, both in 2D and 3D. The central component of Virtual Sardinia is i3D, a high-speed 3D scene viewer for the World-wide Web. Using a Spaceball, the user can intuitively navigate with continuous viewpoint control inside threedimensional data, while selecting 3D objects with the mouse triggers requests for access to remote media documents that can be distributed over the Internet. For the Virtual Sardinia project, the main 3D model that is explored by the users is a three-dimensional reconstruction of the island of Sardinia built from a digital terrain model texture-mapped with satellite images.