2008 IEEE Virtual Reality Workshop on
Virtual Cityscapes: Key Research Issues in Modeling Large-Scale Immersive Urban Environments

Workshop Overview

The goal of the Virtual Cityscapes Workshop is to gather a multi-disciplinary collection of researchers (virtual reality, robotics, AI, vision, computer graphics, sociology, psychology, and traffic engineering) to closely examine the key research issues required to model large-scale immersive urban environments and populate them with realistic virtual crowds and avatars with individuality and characteristics. Issues may include:

  • Cityscape: what is the state-of-the-art in creating the basic virtual city (streets and buildings)? What technology (e.g. 3D acquisition, mapping, capturing, reconstruction, procedural modeling, and authoring) is available for "geo-typical" and "geo-specific" and how do they differ? What is the cost of creating a Cityscape? What about mark-up?
  • "People-scape": an urban environment is defined as much by the population as by the buildings. What techniques (e.g. planning and navigation, collision avoidance, locomotion, behavior modeling, machine learning, etc.) are available for populating the city with virtual humans? How realistic can they be? How are they generated? Can various human behavior be included?
  • Applications: How much realism and fidelity is required for different applications? What applications require physical detail beyond the basics? For example, weather, wind, litter, traffic, building interiors, and functional objects (e.g. sewers, powerlines, etc.)?
  • Architecture and implementation: human many humans can be effectively hosted in a virtual city? How scalable are the existing approaches? Should there be open architectures to promote collaboration?
    •  The workshop program will include invited talks on the current state-of-the-art or other topics, contributed presentations by the Workshop participants, panel discussion, and breakout sessions on sub-topics of interest.

    Workshop Organizers

    Ming C. Lin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    Peter G. Selfridge, SET Corporation

    International Program Committee

  • Barb Cutler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Kostas Daniilidis, University of Pennsylvania
  • Stephane Donikian, CNRS/IRISA
  • Theodore Kim, IBM T.J. Watson/Cornell University
  • Pascal Mueller, ETH Zurich
  • Carol O'Sullivan, Trinity College at Dublin
  • Julien Pettre, INRIA-Rennes
  • Avneesh Sud, Microsoft Corporation
  • Ruigang Yang, University of Kentucky
  • Sungeui Yoon, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  • Suya You, University of Southern California