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Creation of 3D content in networked environments is a growing field of research, and its application will be key in many sectors such as medicine, simulation and cultural heritage. However, not many solutions exist that are able to use and manage 3D objects in such environments. In this paper, we present an architecture for the intelligent creation of imaginary worlds for running in a networked environment using technologies from disparate fields. This intelligent creation of an imaginary world enables end users to interactively run or walk within a 3D world. In order to improve the immersion experience we propose the use of external devices such as a treadmill and headphones with microphone. In this manner, users will interact with the system and with other users. The key components in the proposed architecture are a multiuser server, which will enable interaction among users, and a content server, which will piece together geospatial data and 3D media objects to automatically build the imaginary world and augment it with real data.

Current simulation applications are mainly focused on the efficient management of scenarios with static objects. However, managing dynamic objects, such as animated characters, is very different and requires more specific processing methods which tend to have a high computational cost. Recent advances in graphics hardware offer more ways to improve the performance of these scenes. In this paper, we introduce a new method for rendering large crowds of animated characters at interactive frame rates. Our method is a fully-GPU hybrid combination of mesh instancing, continuous level of detail and hardware palette skinning. Thus, we take advantage of mesh instancing to render multiple instances of a given mesh belonging to a continuous level of detail model, avoiding the typical popping artifacts existing on previous approaches. We finally obtained a low storage cost, performance improvements when applying level of detail and mesh instancing techniques and, moreover, a minimization of the overhead produced by animating.

In this paper we present the control and surveillance platform that is currently being developed within the ViCoMo project. This project is aimed at developing a context modeling system which can reconstruct the events that happen in a large infrastructure. The data is presented through a 3D visualization where all the information collected from the different cameras can be displayed at the same time. The 3D environment has been modeled with high accuracy to assure a correct simulation of the scenario. A special emphasis has been put on the development of a fast and secure network to manage the data that is generated. We present some initial results obtained from seven cameras located in a Port Terminal in Spain.

Virtual environments for interactive applications demand highly realistic scenarios, which tend to be large and densely populated with very detailed meshes. Despite the outstanding evolution of graphics hardware, current GPUs are still not capable of managing these vast amounts of geometry. A solution to overcome this problem is the use of level-of-detail techniques, which recently have been oriented towards the exploitation of GPUs. Nevertheless, although some solutions present very good results, they are usually based on complex data structures and algorithms. We thus propose a new multiresolution model based on triangles which is simple and efficient. The main idea is to modify the list of vertices when changing to a new level of detail, in contrast to previous models which modify the index list, which simplifies the extraction process. This feature also provides a perfect framework for adapting the algorithm to work completely on the GPU.

Recent advances in graphics hardware provide new possibilities to successfully integrate and improve multiresolution models In this paper, we present a new continuous multiresolution model that maintains its geometry, based on triangle strips, in high-performance memory in the GPU This model manages the level of detail by performing fast strip updating operations We show how this approach takes advantage of the new capabilities of GPUs in an efficient manner.