virtual reality centre @ RMIT

I recently had a tour of the VRC at RMIT. It's pretty impressive. Urban Futures Consulting uses the lab to create a “real-time immersive setting” where they “procedurally generate a building envelope model for a precinct as a commercial proposition, direct from GIS data tables”. In simple terms, they take GIS data to build a 3d model of a cityscape. Then they take aerial photos of the site and drop them on for texture. Then they go into the streets with digital camera and capture images of the shop fronts, which they past onto the 3d models. You then don a set of those IMAX goggles and you can walk through a city (I was shown Melbourne CBD for example). Pretty interesting stuff.