32 projects in archive...

>3DiGMA

Images archive

3DiGMA (3D Digital Gallery of Modern Arts) is a project of Ultramundum Foundation for the development of the first 3D extreme quality museum of the world.

Until today, only image-based web sites that improperly use the term 'virtual' or 3D environments (simulated with photographs or with very low quality) have been published, due to the huge data load needed to generate a large photorealistic 3D world where the aesthetics are the most important part.

When you want to publish a museum on the web there only few options:

1) you can create a classical site with images of the elements and some buttons to go from one 'room' (i.e. a series of images) to another, sometimes providing also a map of the museum; surely the most used option but it has nothing 'virtual' and does not deliver an experience even vaguely similar to that of a real visit.

2) you can use 360 degrees pictures (like quicktime VR, the Google museum or streetview) that allow the user to 'look around' as if he was in a point and there was a sphere of photographs of the place around; interesting, but there is no way to move from one point to another if not with 'jumps' of several meters to pass fron one sphere of photographs (for instance in the lobby) to the next (for instance in the first room). At first it may seem enough, but as soon as you want to go near an object the only option is to 'zoom', enlarging the image that soon shows the pixels its made of. 360 degrees pictures, of spaces as well as obiects, are 'tricks' that do not allow for a realistic exploration. Just think about the fact that it is impossible to 'turn around' an obstacle to see what is behind. Movement between the various points is made with jumps of several meters or even from the center of one room to the center of another.

3) you can create real 3D environments explorable in realtime; few examples are available on Internet. The quality of the rendering is far from that of photorealism and is quite near that of a cartoon; it is therefore unthinkable to use this technique to create an exhibition of objects, like works of art, that have in their aesthetics the most important point.

For all these reasons, the Ultramundum Foundation, when launched the project to create an art gallery to give the option of exhibiting their works to emerging artist, directly on the web all over the world without any need for them and the visitors to travel and pollute, decided to use its technologies for realtime 3D, pushing them to a new level called 'extreme quality' that is in many points indistinguishable from a direct video shooting of a museum in the phisical world.

The project, called 3DiGMA (3D Digital Galley of Modern Art), uses the Ultramundum UltraPeg technology and an extremely sophisticated set of light computations to generate environments where light is the main character, digital worlds almost identical to the phisical one. This set of thechniques, called 'XQ: eXtreme Quality', uses other advanced rendering technologies like environment mapping, environment reflection, bump mapping, normal maps and many others to create realistic surfaces and interactions between the objects on the scene and the light sources. Reflections, colors and shadows move in realtime while the user walks in the rooms, creating a sensation of reality and allowing the fruition of the art works in the same fashion of a phisical experience.

3DiGMA allows the exploration of the entire gallery, many thousands of square meters and large external parts, on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology, 3DiGMA offers an interactive world where the user can even insert his/her phisical parameters ( for instance his/her height), explore everywhere, inspect anything to get any nuance and also activate an automatic guided tour to interact only where its wanted.

This project is also a 'tech demo' clearly showing the level of realism and precision that can be reached with the UltraPeg technology and the UltraPort software of the Ultramundum Foundation: all images are direct screenshots of a standard PC with the product running in realtime.

The project is almost completed and will start with an exhibition of emerging artists; the invite for the vernissage will be sent to all Ultramundum registered users.

>4DMoon

Images archive

Created by the Ultramundum Foundation for the 'Mission Apollo' project, the interactive 3D model of the whole Moon is offered to the public for the first time in the world in May 2009. Similar products are NASA WorldWind and Google Earth (offering Earth and Mars but not the Moon), the Foundation is the first to publish all the Moon without 'holes' and in real-time 3D with a continuous descent from space to surface level.
Available NASA data have may problems and Ultramundum has developed a number of complex algorithms to create a continuous global planetary surface coverage. A degree thesis analyses the complexities of the work that has been done and is available on this site.
The Foundation is faster than Google that is working at the same project with a version of Google Earth and is probably suffering from the same problems of fragmentation of NASA data.

To see an example, click on this image that shows NASA WorldWind and UltraPort side-by-side:

NASAvsUltramundum

on july 2009 Ultramundum beats again Google in the 3DMoon 'space race'.
The 4DMoon project is now at version 2.0 and has been published as freeware on-line July 15 2009, Google announces publishing Google Moon on july 21. So the Foundation has beaten the powerful american corporation right on the 'cutting edge' tecnology of interactive real-time 3D planets. Without any budget, without any sponsors, Ultramund succeeded in publishing an extremely advanced software to celebrate 40 years from the man landing on the Moon. Other projects with large budgets often do not arrive to a fraction of this result; Ultramundum is again an italian world leader in the sector of 3D interactive real-time environments capable of ranging from planetary scale down to sub-meter details at ground level.

In the 2.0 version Ultramundum inserted all the high resolution landing areas of Apollo missions from 11 to 17, with the models of the Descent Stages (the 'legs' that have been left on the Moon) of the LEM (Lunar exploration module). The models have been crafted starting from schematics and pictures from NASA, with a peculiar aging technique to show how they would look like after 40 years of exposition to micrometeroids and cosimc rays. Thanks to this effort they are the most realistic reconstructions of these places available today.

In each zone the astronauts paths, either walking or with the Lunar Rover, have been highlighted.
In this way everybody can experiment the thrill of the descent from orbit to the surface and appreciate the vastness of the model of the moon where spaceships appear minuscule. It is possible to zoom on the commemorative plaque of Apollo 11, even seeing the holding rivets, and reading the signatures of the astronautsM; the fly up and with a single sight embrace millions of square chilometers of surface.
As an homage to the soviet run to the space of those years, Ultramundum has inserted also the models of the first radio controlld rovers to explore an extraterrestrial territory: Lunokhod 1 and 2. Those robots of the '70s have been a huge achievement for Russia.

For fans of mistery and conspiracy Ultramundum inserted the 3D model of the alleged alien spaceship on the hidden side of the Moon. "we do not endorse this story, that NASA says is untrue" explains Fulvio Dominici, president of Ultramundum, "but the videos published on Internet and the fact that traces of this object are present in official photos taken by Apollo 15 are quite intriguing".

The 3D models (PIDs or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) developed and under development by Ultramundum Foundation deliver extremely large areas for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism.

The dimensions of the explorable environments reach far beyond what is possible today, for example in the latest videogames, arriving to entire planets.

Larger planetary complexes can be simulated, arriving to star systems and groups of stars. The technologies that can produce such a huge level of simulations are called PlanetWide PIDs (PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas). They allow the exploration of a celestial body of any dimension from space down to ground level, finding human-scale details and reaching even the atomic and subatomic level. The supported range on the UltraPort platform of the Ultramundum Foundation goes from 50 billions light years down to one thousandth of the dimension of cosmic strings, presumably the smallest component of matter.

To create this kind of products, new software modules and procedures have been developed, beyond the base procedural parametric technology UltraPeg based on Tabulae.

First, UltraPort supports the jerarchical cellular decomposition of the surface of entire planets; this is achived with the PlanetSector system. It is composed by Tabulae that are capable of automatically generate jearchical planetary surfaces, subdiving progressively in subelements of the same type near the user's Avatar and so producing a variable detail rpresentation of the entire celestial body. In this way, near the observer the terrain appears extremely detailed and the resolution lowers toward the horizon, where there are farther portions; the user-perceived resolution appears constant. An entire planet can be explored interactively and appear highly detailed everywhere, even on low power and memory PCs. The jerarchical PlanetSectors structure id dynamic: when the observer moves, the PlanetSectors toward his direction subdivide in others more detailed, while those at the back are substituted by thier lower-resolution ancestors. The resulting structure is highly dynamic and automatically modifies itself when the Avatar moves, producing entire star systems that allow any kind of trips.

PlanetSectors thus represent portions of the planetary surface progressively more detailed. They start from level zero, that covers the entire planet. Level 1 is composed by two PlanetSectors, one for the north emisphere and one for the south. Level 2 is made by six PlanetSectors, three for each emisphere. From level 3 onwards each PlanetSector subdivides in four for each successive level, up to the maximum resolution. With this technology the temperate regions PlanetSectors, where most of the cities are, have approximately a square shape when projected on the planet spheroid, while the others are progressively mre distorted.

A specific UltraPort module dynamically subdivides the Planetectors where the Avatar is, leaving the farther away ones at a lower level, generating a variable detail structure that shows an apparently extremely high resolution in any point of the planet. Sophisticated systems position the PlanetSectors are 'plates' on the planet spheroid and convert from euclidean coordinates to non-euclidean ones on a sphere, using all the cartographic conventions.

The NASA file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

We wish to thank NASA for the publications of the planetary data needed for the creation od this abitious project.

>Extractor

Images archive

Extractor is the free tool created by the Ultramundum Foundation to allow users to visualize and explore 3D digital models created in 'classic' format and to apply on them the processes normally needed to prepare them for the realtime rendering.

With Extractor it is possible to open files of single or multiple models created with 'classic' softwares like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Blender, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, AutoCAD and many others.

Those 'classic' models are not Tabulae (the 'building blocks' of the Foundation's UltraPeg technology), and so are not procedural nor parametric; nonentheless, in many cases they need to be inserted into the 3D worlds generated with UltraPort. In those cases there is a model in a modeling software that needs to be converted into a Tabula to be then processed by other Tabulae that could position/animate it in realtime. For instance, you could have a model of a building and you could want to see how it would look when inserted into a square in Rome. The city of Rome is a PID (PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) completely procedural, while the model is made with AutoCAD.

It would be as simple as opening in Extractor the file saved from AutoCAD, maybe modify it to prepare it for realtime and then save it in the specific Ultramundum format for legacy models: .PUM (Portable Ultramundum Model). In the UltraPort development environment it is possible to create a Tabula project of type "legacy 3D model" that wraps the .PUM file. From that moment on the model is a regular Tabula and can be used as any other one in the UltraPort platform.

The passage in Extractor is needed to convert the model to the standard .PUM format that is compact and efficient. Models of other types are of very large dimensions and do not embed the texture images; very often they get lost and produce an error at the opening of the model. A .PUM file, on the contrary, embeds all the resources and is extremely compressed to reduce its size at a minimum.

Another operation done by Extractor is to extremely optimize the model. Applying all the optimizations for the hardware accelerated rendering, Extractor modifies the format of the data and compacts them to generate the fastest rendering possible. It is not uncommon to see extremely huge models go from two frames per seconds without optimization to fifthy or more simply after a passage in Extractor.

Some typical settings for realtime are not done by modeling packages and Extractors allows them to be set at will before saving the model to .PUM format.
For instance, transparency (heavy on the computational power) can be turned on or off and switched to Alpha blending or Alpha testing for each element of the model.

In the same way, normals of each element or the whole of the model can be recalculated applying a smoothing in ten levels from 0% to 100%.

Often models are not created at axes origin and do not lay at Z=0, this creates problems when they need to be positioned. Extractor has commands for the automatic centering and rotation and translation of the scene, to generate a model easily positionable when used as a 'building block' in the final scene.

Materials are another problem on the most part of models exported from 3D packages: Extractor allows the resetting, amplification or optimization of each of their components exactly as they will be visualized on the hardware accelerator of the video card.

All these settings are needed when the model is not created for realtime rendering in a software that may have a powerful raytracer, but a poor support for the simpler functions available in interactive 3D.

Wih Extractor it is easy to add a Bump Mapping effect, that is a technique that renders an object with a perceived complexity even if with a simpler geometry, using a second texture to add all the bumps.

Another effect that can easily be applied with Extractor is the Environment Mapping or Reflection Mapping, a technique that uses a texture to simulate the reflections of the surronding environment, for instance to create 'chrome' objects.

>FABER meeting

Images archive

The Ultramundum Foundation cooperated in the event "FABER meeting - quando la creatività incontra l'impresa" (creativity encounters business), organized by the Turin city Council, the Piedmont regional government and the Chamber of Commerce.

The event has been a meeting opportunity between young creatives and companies of the "creative economy". Meetings, workshops and discussions at Virtual Reality e Multimedia Park of Turin were a collective experiment of a new way of interacting among all advanced operatos in the creative economy.

Seventy audiovisual works, web and design projects have been presented by talented national young creatives.

Ultramundum was part of the evaluation panel that selected the winning works, some of them are presented here with some selected scenes. The prizes went to those that shown not only a good technical capability, but also original language and content.

>Kinder Happy Hippo talent show

Images archive

The HappyHippo Talent Show project has been developed for the new generation of electronic surprises of Ferrero corporation for its chocolate eggs "Kinder surprise", a worldwide distributed product sold in billions of pieces every year.

THe new series of characters, based on the historical "HappyHippo", has been conceived as the set of participiants to the Talent Show, something similar to TV shows like "American Idol". Several artists (singers, dancers, musicians) alternate on the set of the HappyHippo Talent Show for artistical contests, presented by the DJ "Tony Turntable", another HappyHippo with a yellow T-shirt.

The main product of the series has been an USB memory stick shaped like "Tony Turntable" and containing various softwares in three different languages that can run on a standard PC. The system offers also a connection to the company servers to download upgrades and new games.

The UltraPort software of Ultramundum Foundation has been used to develop the control system of applications and also for the creation of five 3D games and the game of the director of the intro sequence for the show. Other 2D games and animations based on Flash have been inserted into the final product.

UltraPort starts automatically at the insertion of the "Tony Turntable" USB and checks the processing power of the system and the availability of 3D hardware acceleration. Thanks to this starting test it is possible to determine if the system is too old (cheap computers more than ten years old) and so it is better to star with simple 2D Flash games, or it is possible to activate the user options for the 3D games.

Other automatic UltraPort safeguards allow the detection of errors in drivers, especially those of the video card, and the automatic resolution of the problems without any intervention of the user that in many cases can be a child. Thanks to all these options and services of UltraPort, the product did not produce a single complaint, even if it has been distributed in a total of more than two million pieces.

The huge number of installations made this the biggest distribution of UltraPort and the most extensive test on the field so far. Ultramundum was satisfied that not a single complaint came from the public, even if the product has been distributed in many countries of the world and used on the most diverse hardware platforms and operating systems. We noticed that even largely successful platforms (for instance Flash) have problems controlling events and functions outside them and do not offer typical system services; UltraPort has perfectly managed all the software system, controlling Flash applications, the management of direct communications with system hardware and delivering services that go far beyond realtime 3D, like for instance the processing of parametric communications with the Ferrero servers.
This projects has really shown that UltraPort is nearer to a small operating system than to a simple 3D realtime rendering engine.

The Ultramundum technicians also worked on software systems for automatic testing used by Ferrero directly on the production lines to check the contents of the USB sticks and detect and reject those with hardware problems or software anomalies.

For the contents of the USBs, UltraPort allowed the creation in three different languages of five complete 3D interactive games and the management platform, all in few tens of megabytes thus leaving most of the space on the USB memory for the files of the users. It is important to notice that with the softwares of the Foundation it is possible to create applications of planetary scale, that process many gigabytes of data, as well as simple games that create colourful microworlds that could be inserted in a shoe box and occupy only few megabytes.


The games created are:

- MAGIC STAVE -
Help our friend DJ jump from one note to the other on the stave while the music plays. Press the space bar to pass from one note to another, but be careful not to fall off. There are 3 different levels of difficulty.

- SHOWER OF NOTES -
A shower of multicoloured notes falls from the sky. Try to compose a melody by clicking on the green notes with your mouse. Careful: the red notes are out of tune, so avoid them!

- XILOPHONE -
Have fun playing your favourite music on the xylophone, simply by clicking on the bars with your mouse.
If you prefer a challenge, click the red or green button to start the game. Click on the bars in time with the music and you will play two famous melodies.

- HIDDEN PICTURE -
Put together the pictures of the notes that appear for a few seconds on the coloured floor. In order to do this, you will need to jump by clicking on the box where a patch of colour is hidden. This colour will match what is shown in the centre of the panel at the bottom. If you jump on the right box, it will stay lit, otherwise it will switch off after a few seconds. There are 3 levels of difficulty.

- CONVEYOR BELT -
Help our friend DJ reach the stage as quickly as possible before the show starts. Connect the pieces of the conveyor belt by clicking on the box where you want to place each piece, shown in the centre panel at the bottom

- HAPPY HIPPO TALENT SHOW DIRECTOR -
A complete video editing system that allows the creation ot the HappyHippo Talent Show intro sequence and check it to then record it on a standard file that can be sent everywhere.
With this product an extremely sophisticated system has been created, one that children can use to define the position of the character and the camera, the animation of the character and the color of the lights in each temporal segment of a video sequence.
UltraPort fully supports the creation of video files in many formats directly from the product, while the various animation parameters are interpolated in realtime.

>3D interactive Witheboard-compatible map of italy for Schools

Images archive

The VIRTUAL ITALY project, aimed at the production of a four-dimensional model of Italy, has produced a first commercial product: "Italia fisica VLIM3D" (Phisical map of Italy).

Thanks to the base of the whole geopositioned and metrical 3D realtime Italy, the didactic map of the whole country has been completed. UltraPort fully supports LIMs (Interactive Multimedia Whiteboards) that are being installed into many schools and allows for an extremely advanced interaction, almost 'science fiction', with didactical contents. Teachers, with products like this, can move in 3D the whole virtual world on the witheboard, in a way that until today has only been seen in the movie 'Minority Report' with Tom Cruise.

What was fiction, today is reality. These 3D didactical applications deliver a new way of teaching that is more appealing to the students; they fully know and appreciate this kind of technologies. Ultramundum has been working with the world of school for quite a long time and studied the opportunities and the problems that arise with these new systems, crafting a unique support for the Interactive Multimedia Whiteboards and the computers used by students. This first product is a spectacular application of this ongoing work.

The Foundation is willing to share this knoweledge and the software platforms that support these techniques, going on along the path of the continuous cooperation with all operators of the world of teaching.

With the Foundation in this project there are other partners: SOFIHA collaudi srl and Edizioni Il Capitello spa.


The project "VIRTUAL ITALY" will provide for an ultravision channel where the three-dimensional model of Italy will be freely explorable in Internet with a normal personal computer.
It will be possible to travel back in time while elements of the environment will change accordingly, a sort of virtual time machine.

It will be the first time an entire country is modeled in 3D with time exploration. If we remember that Italy holds half of the cultural heritage of the world, the enormous cultural value of the project becames evident.

Thanks to the Ultramundum patented technology the Virtual Italy model will be the first to be available on the Internet in interactive 3D with high details. Traditional 3D techniques require long download times or CD-Rom distribution, while this new technology will provide a live interactive model everywhere on the planet at high speed.

The platform will be enriched in time with new multimedia elements, creating a sort of four-dimensional encichlopaedia of Italy.

An high volume of traffic is expected, making the product extremely interesting for sponsors and people wanting to insert their names in one of the biggest collection of masterpieces of mankind.

Somebody could say that similar products already exist, for example 'Google Earth'; but this project is different, it is completely procedural and its capable of creating the ground details so that the generated models are at the same level of those fond into the more advanced videogames. All 'traditional' products rely on photographs that, even at the highest resolutions, can not deliver the semantic representation that is needed for a believable ground visualization. This is an european product, completely developed in Italy, and deserves attention for its potential in this sector.

the Ultramundum Foundation has been developing this project for a long time, with the only help of volunteers and the academic world, reaching a level of development where it is at pair with similar products created in nations where there are serious founds for the research and development in this field. We hope the help of many people will continue, to create something really different and better in such an innovative and important field.

>3D model of Italy for the 150 years from unification

Images archive

The VIRTUAL ITALY project, aimed at the creation of a four-dimensional model of Italy, has generated another product for a museum: "Italia 150" for the Gianduja museum.

For the celebrations of the 150 years from the unification of Italy ("Esperienza Italia 150"), the museum of Gianduja has been opened in the "Le Serre" park in Grugliasco. The many multimedia interactive 3D installations have been created by Ultramundum for the project, funded by the regional and provincial government, in partnership with the city of Grugliasco, the "Isitituto per i Beni Marionettistici" and "Le Serre" company.

One of many installations, the one at the entrance of the underground floor of "Villa Boriglione" had to insert Gianduja (an italian piedmont fictional burlesque character) in the context of the struggle for the unification of Italy circa 1860. The installation is made of a large plasma television connected to a PC running the Foundation's UltraPort software and a wireless USB remote control; with it the guides can activate the various options and even navigate over the model using the keys on the remote, very similar to the television one.

The product shows the Ultramundum Foundation 3D realtime virtual Italy with a transparent map in different colors on each area of the reigns Italy was divided into at the time. This superimposes a thematic map to the phisical model of the country. The places depicted in the document "L'alfabeto di Pasquino" (the Pasquino alphabet), shown in the upper floor, are highlighted with geopositioning. When a place is activated, the user is positioned there and starts orbiting, while the relevant part of the document scrolls on the screen with a voice telling the story.

The "L'alfabeto di Pasquino" (the Pasquino alphabet), is a satirical document of 1871, a 3,55 m x 18,2 cm lithography published by Casimiro TEJA .



The project "VIRTUAL ITALY" will provide for an ultravision channel where the three-dimensional model of Italy will be freely explorable in Internet with a normal personal computer.
It will be possible to travel back in time while elements of the environment will change accordingly, a sort of virtual time machine.

It will be the first time an entire country is modeled in 3D with time exploration. If we remember that Italy holds half of the cultural heritage of the world, the enormous cultural value of the project becames evident.

Thanks to the Ultramundum patented technology the Virtual Italy model will be the first to be available on the Internet in interactive 3D with high details. Traditional 3D techniques require long download times or CD-Rom distribution, while this new technology will provide a live interactive model everywhere on the planet at high speed.

The platform will be enriched in time with new multimedia elements, creating a sort of four-dimensional encichlopaedia of Italy.

An high volume of traffic is expected, making the product extremely interesting for sponsors and people wanting to insert their names in one of the biggest collection of masterpieces of mankind.

Somebody could say that similar products already exist, for example 'Google Earth'; but this project is different, it is completely procedural and its capable of creating the ground details so that the generated models are at the same level of those fond into the more advanced videogames. All 'traditional' products rely on photographs that, even at the highest resolutions, can not deliver the semantic representation that is needed for a believable ground visualization. This is an european product, completely developed in Italy, and deserves attention for its potential in this sector.

the Ultramundum Foundation has been developing this project for a long time, with the only help of volunteers and the academic world, reaching a level of development where it is at pair with similar products created in nations where there are serious founds for the research and development in this field. We hope the help of many people will continue, to create something really different and better in such an innovative and important field.

>Las Vega Stardust casino 3D interactive historical model

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the Stardust LasVegas casino in 1985 has been created for a degree thesis of the course on informatic engineering of Politecnico of Turin.

After the creation of the model in Blender, starting from historical pictures and data, the students wanted to insert it into an application to explore it in realtime. Being the model more than one million triangles in size, it was difficult to find platforms to visualize it in realtime.

Thanks to the import made with the Ultramundum Foundation tool Extractor, this huge model has been optimized for realtime and converted into Tabulae to be used directly in UltraPort.

The UltraPort platform was capable of moving all the model in 3D in realtime with smooth movements, It has also been possible to use the "Spectator" Tabula to create an Ultravision movie that delivers a spoken story of the place while the camera is moved automatically in the points that are depicted. Historical pictures have been inserted into the story and are activated and positioned so that they superimpose to the model most important parts.

If you stop the movie, it is possible to freely look around, unlike a standard video, and even start from the current position to explore the entire environment.

The final product has been sent to the United States research center the students have worked with.

>Gianduja museum - Flying carpet

Images archive

The installation "Flying carpet" for the Gianduja museum is a simple yet extremely effective application of UltraPort.

For the celebrations of the 150 years from the unification of Italy ("Esperienza Italia 150"), the museum of Gianduja has been opened in the "Le Serre" park in Grugliasco. The many multimedia interactive 3D installations have been created by Ultramundum for the project, funded by the regional and provincial government, in partnership with the city of Grugliasco, the "Isitituto per i Beni Marionettistici" and "Le Serre" company.

One of many installations, the one at first floor of "Villa Boriglione" had to allow visitors to move on a series of documents linked to Gianduja (an italian piedmont fictional burlesque character) that did not fit in the space available for the phisical exhibition. The installation is made of a large vertical plasma TV connected to a PC running the Foundation's UltraPort software and a control system made with the 3D Connexion mouse; by using it the guides and the visitors can fly over a surface where the documents lay and can go really near each one of them over a practicly endless explorable space.

The effect is that of a spectacular flight over a virtual surface controlling the movements with a kind of joystick that has six degrees of freedom, three for translations and three for rotations. Thanks to the UltraPort support for a lot of devices like 3D Connexion, visitors can experience new ways of exploring 3D worlds.

It is worth noting from the images that the product must run 'rotated' on one side and not in the normal 16:9 landscape position because the plasma TV is positioned in vertical. Few products support the 90 degrees rotation of the user 3D point of view like UltraPort, needed in particular installations like this.

>Gianduja museum - Piedmont places

Images archive

The VIRTUAL ITALY project, aimed at the creation of a four-dimensional model of Italy, and the The Turin PID 2.0 project, have generated another product for a museum: "Gianduja places in Piedmont" for the Gianduja museum.

For the celebrations of the 150 years from the unification of Italy ("Esperienza Italia 150"), the museum of Gianduja has been opened in the "Le Serre" park in Grugliasco. The many multimedia interactive 3D installations have been created by Ultramundum for the project, funded by the regional and provincial government, in partnership with the city of Grugliasco, the "Isitituto per i Beni Marionettistici" and "Le Serre" company.

One of many installations, the main one in the underground floor of "Villa Boriglione" had to show places linked to Gianduja (an italian piedmont fictional burlesque character) in the map of the whole Piedmont region and its cities, explorable in a spectacular fashion. The installation is made of a large videoprojection on the main wall and a smaller one on a lateral surface, both created by two videoprojectors connected to a PC running the Foundation's UltraPort software and a wireless Logithech MX Air mouse; with it the guides and the visitors can activate the various options and navigate over the model by moving the mouse in the air.

The effect, with the lighs dimmed, is that of a spectacular flight over the Piedmont region, controlled by a sort of 'magic wand'. Clicking on the markers the relevant images scroll on the screen with a voice telling the story. This installation had a huge success, especially with younger visitors that can experiment with a system that delivers an experience similar to that of the home videogames, but at a larger scale and with an exciting control system.



The projects of Ultramundum Foundation that have been the starting point of this installation are:


--- The project "VIRTUAL ITALY" that will provide for an ultravision channel where the three-dimensional model of Italy will be freely explorable in Internet with a normal personal computer.
It will be possible to travel back in time while elements of the environment will change accordingly, a sort of virtual time machine.

It will be the first time an entire country is modeled in 3D with time exploration. If we remember that Italy holds half of the cultural heritage of the world, the enormous cultural value of the project becames evident.

Thanks to the Ultramundum patented technology the Virtual Italy model will be the first to be available on the Internet in interactive 3D with high details. Traditional 3D techniques require long download times or CD-Rom distribution, while this new technology will provide a live interactive model everywhere on the planet at high speed.

The platform will be enriched in time with new multimedia elements, creating a sort of four-dimensional encichlopaedia of Italy.

An high volume of traffic is expected, making the product extremely interesting for sponsors and people wanting to insert their names in one of the biggest collection of masterpieces of mankind.

Somebody could say that similar products already exist, for example 'Google Earth'; but this project is different, it is completely procedural and its capable of creating the ground details so that the generated models are at the same level of those fond into the more advanced videogames. All 'traditional' products rely on photographs that, even at the highest resolutions, can not deliver the semantic representation that is needed for a believable ground visualization. This is an european product, completely developed in Italy, and deserves attention for its potential in this sector.

the Ultramundum Foundation has been developing this project for a long time, with the only help of volunteers and the academic world, reaching a level of development where it is at pair with similar products created in nations where there are serious founds for the research and development in this field. We hope the help of many people will continue, to create something really different and better in such an innovative and important field.



--- The Turin city PID 2.0, officially patronaged by the City Council on January 29 2008,
is derived from 1.0 version, developed for the 2006 olympic games, and delivers the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism in any portion; being completely open source, its Tabulae (elements at the base of the Foundation's technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.
Turin has been the first large city to have a complete public three-dimensional model explorable in real-time.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with undhreds of thousands of buildings, has ever been prohibitive.
The Turin 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a low-cost video card. Unusually powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to the patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

For the development of PIDs, special Automatic Details Generators have been created. They are sets of Tabulae that are capable of creating realistic models of areas and elements defined into cartographic databases (buildings, parks, ...) so that a rich and believable environment is shown, without any need for high-resolution imagery. In this way, as you can see in the pictures of the product, most places, for instance flowerbeds, show details of the grass blades and not a simple green cover.

In the 1.0 PID every city building was present, with a prism precisely defining the ground perimeter and height; in this way the volume was perfectly modelled. in PID 2.0 each city building is created with highly detailed graphics, thanks to the Automatic Details Generators.

Other elements have been added, producing an extremely detailed model that with classic technologies would have needed many gigabytes.
Highly realistic and precise models of almost every important monument have been inserted, all Turin downtown can be explored with extreme details.

>Gianduja museum - Virtual theater

Images archive

The installation "Virtual theatres" for the Gianduja museum is a simple yet extremely effective application of UltraPort.

For the celebrations of the 150 years from the unification of Italy ("Esperienza Italia 150"), the museum of Gianduja has been opened in the "Le Serre" park in Grugliasco. The many multimedia interactive 3D installations have been created by Ultramundum for the project, funded by the regional and provincial government, in partnership with the city of Grugliasco, the "Isitituto per i Beni Marionettistici" and "Le Serre" company.

One of many installations, the Virtual theatres multiple ones at ground floor of "Villa Boriglione" had to allow visitors to animate historical puppets of Gianduja (an italian piedmont fictional burlesque character) and the devil. The original puppets are too precious to allow them to be touched by people, especially the children; the inovative solution has been to digitalize them in 3D and place them into a virtual small theatre that also has the backgrounds and foregrounds of phisical historical ones. Ultramundum Foundation, in cooperation with "Isitituto per i Beni Marionettistici" (historical puppets institute), has seen live shows of important puppeteers, recording audio and video data; at the end of each show all the stuff used has been accurately measured, while the origial puppets have been scanned and converted into precise 3D models. Starting from this material the Foundation has created the Tabulae needed and an UltraPort application to let all visitors try the puppeteer side of the show.

The installation is made of three monitors inserted into vertical brick niches connected to a PC running the Foundation's UltraPort software. More than one installation was needed to let all students of each class to use the theatres.
It is worth noting that each PC controls three monitors. Few products support this like UltraPort, and this feature is needed in particular installations like this.

Each visitor can change bagkgrounds, foregrounds, lights and the camera position. The puppets can be animated in their classical poses, rotated and translated on the stage. This product had a great success, with children in queue to make Gianduja beat the devil.

This product represents also an important proposal of the organizations that worked on it, that could be extended to the rest of the historical stuff of the theater and of other elements of the museums that can not be exposed nor manipulated by the public. This kind of interaction is of great cultural value; even objects from 1800 can be offered in hi-tech solutions that are particularly attractive to the young public, that 'talks' the language of computers and 3D.

>PID Pianezza

Images archive

The 3D model (PID for PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Pianezza has been created by the Ultramundum Foundation with founds from the City Council.

This product delivers the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism in any portion; being completely open source, its Tabulae (elements at the base of the Foundation's technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Ulike the Turin PID, the city of Pianezza gave to Ultramundum the orthopotos recently produced by an internal project, so that in the product it is possible to see details similar to those visible in Google Earth (for instance the cars); In this product it is also possible to explore the images from a very small distante to verify their actual resolution. The remaining part of the region is rendered with the standard NASA imagery at 15 meters/pixel. In this work it is important to notice that it is possible, thanks to the UltraTools importer, to insert areas of any shape and dimension over the lower-resolution terrain. This is particularly useful when images with higher detail (or, for instance, in infra-red) of irregular areas are available and need to be visualized in interactive 3D on a world made by 'base' resolution images.

Pianezza has been one of the first small cities to have a complete public three-dimensional model explorable in real-time.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with undhreds of thousands of buildings, has ever been prohibitive.
The Turin 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a low-cost video card. Unusually powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to the patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

For the development of PIDs, special Automatic Details Generators have been created. They are sets of Tabulae that are capable of creating realistic models of areas and elements defined into cartographic databases (buildings, parks, ...) so that a rich and believable environment is shown, without any need for high-resolution imagery. In this way, as you can see in the pictures of the product, most places, for instance flowerbeds, show details of the grass blades and not a simple green cover.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology and specific techniques, the work has been done in a very short time and at a cost that is a fraction of the one that would have been needed with conventional technologie.
PIDs can and have been used for many purposes: for new projects study and rendering, in the field of planning, for tourism and promotion of the city image, as archeological and sociological research labs, for training and so on.

The PID is not a closed software, it is a platfom usable in mady different applications and can be modifed or expanded at will.
Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, maps, areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time. The importer is open source, and can be adapted to any specific datan format.
Ultramundum thanks SOFIHA collaudi s.r.l. for the cartographic database used in the creation of the model.

>PID technology

Images archive

The 3D models (PIDs or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) of entire cities developed and under development by Ultramundum Foundation deliver extremely large urban areas for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism and realistic personal / veicular traffic.

PIDs are completely open source and their Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with undhreds of thousands of buildings, has ever been pohibitive.
PIDs allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to the patented UltraPeg technology and the geographical Automatic Detail geenrators, PIDs offer an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

To create this kind of products, new software modules and procedures have been developed, beyond the base procedural parametric technology UltraPeg based on Tabulae.

First, UltraPort supports the jerarchical cellular decomposition of the surface of entire planets; this is achived with the PlanetSector system. It is composed by Tabulae that are capable of automatically generate jearchical planetary surfaces, subdiving progressively in subelements of the same type near the user's Avatar and so producing a variable detail rpresentation of the entire celestial body. In this way, near the observer the terrain appears extremely detailed and the resolution lowers toward the horizon, where there are farther portions; the user-perceived resolution appears constant. An entire planet can be explored interactively and appear highly detailed everywhere, even on low power and memory PCs. The jerarchical PlanetSectors structure id dynamic: when the observer moves, the PlanetSectors toward his direction subdivide in others more detailed, while those at the back are substituted by thier lower-resolution ancestors. The resulting structure is highly dynamic and automatically modifies itself when the Avatar moves, producing entire star systems that allow any kind of trips.

A special debug mode can be activated to see the PlanetSector bounding boxes and coordinates. The coordinate of each planet sector is made from 3 numbers: the PlanetSecor level (0 for the entire planet, 1 for the emisphere, ...), the longitude and the latitude in PlanetSectors form Greenwich and the South pole.

A special debug camera can fly independently of the Avatar position, so that views of the PlanetSectors strcture can be obtained. Without it, the system would continuously update the scene to show a detailed view everywhere the Avatar moves.

An automatic generation is needed to visualize every building of a city with highly realistic graphical details. Just think about the fact that a city like Turin has more than one hundred thousands buildings and Rome has more that five hundred thousands: it is clear that it is not possible to employ a human modeler, that would need an extremely large number of work hours.
The Automatic Buildings Generator is the answer to this problem. It is a set of Tabulae that is capable of producing buildings from cartographic data imported by the open source software UltraTools. Import is all about jerarchical subdivision of the buildings set on the basis of the largest portion of the base on each PlanetSector. Then an analisys module produces the estimated roof structure. All these informations are inserted into a geographical database that is processed by the Automatic Buildings Generator.

Flowerbeds, like other portions of the environment, have details of the grass and not a simple green surface. The open source importer UltraTools subdivides the polygons defining every area (parks, rivers, boardwalks, cultivations) in portions that are PlanetSectors-aligned. Semantic information (normally the type of usage of the ground) are inserted into the resulting database. PlanetSectors generation Tabulae read the database and call other Tabulae (called PlanetSectorProcessors) that generate the resulting visible surface, without any human intervention. For instance, the park generating Tabula 'plant' the grass and represent the ground as dirt with dry leaves to generate a believable meadow.

Other details, such as boardwalks borders, are generated by specific Tabulae called by the PlanetSectorProcessors (for instance the boardwarlks generator). In the PlanetSector system there are vector informations, not raster. This means that, for instance, the boardwalks borders are not defined by pixels of the satellite imagery changing color, inevitably blurred, but by precise lines (vectors) with spatial coordinates and directions. The automatic detail generators can process structural informations, not more or less blurred portions.

A powerful automatic traffic generation system, already available as an academic research, can be inserted into the cellular-subdivided city structure. Veichles and people walk around the streets and boardwalks to bring to life the entire city.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

The Foundation can arrange interactive demonstrations on request, because this product can not be freely distributed yet.

>PID Turin 2.0

Images archive

The 3D model (PID for PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Turin 2.0 has been created by the Ultramundum Foundation with founds from the City Council, mobility division.

The City Council, on January 29 2008, has decided to officially patronage the project.
This product is derived from 1.0 version, developed for the 2006 olympic games, and delivers the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism in any portion; being completely open source, its Tabulae (elements at the base of the Foundation's technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.
Turin has been the first large city to have a complete public three-dimensional model explorable in real-time.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with undhreds of thousands of buildings, has ever been prohibitive.
The Turin 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a low-cost video card. Unusually powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to the patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

For the development of PIDs, special Automatic Details Generators have been created. They are sets of Tabulae that are capable of creating realistic models of areas and elements defined into cartographic databases (buildings, parks, ...) so that a rich and believable environment is shown, without any need for high-resolution imagery. In this way, as you can see in the pictures of the product, most places, for instance flowerbeds, show details of the grass blades and not a simple green cover.

In the 1.0 PID every city building was present, with a prism precisely defining the ground perimeter and height; in this way the volume was perfectly modelled. in PID 2.0 each city building is created with highly detailed graphics, thanks to the Automatic Details Generators.

Other elements have been added, producing an extremely detailed model that with classic technologies would have needed many gigabytes.
Highly realistic and precise models of almost every important monument have been inserted, all Turin downtown can be explored with extreme details.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology and specific techniques, the work has been done in a very short time and at a cost that is a fraction of the one that would have been needed with conventional technologie.
PIDs can and have been used for many purposes: for new projects study and rendering, in the field of planning, for tourism and promotion of the city image, as archeological and sociological research labs, for training and so on.

The PID is not a closed software, it is a platfom usable in mady different applications and can be modifed or expanded at will.
Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, maps, areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time. The importer is open source, and can be adapted to any specific datan format.
Ultramundum thanks SOFIHA collaudi s.r.l. for the cartographic database used in the creation of the model.

>PID Turin 3.0

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Turin 3.0 is under development by Ultramundum Foundation.

This model is derived from 2.0 and 1.0 versions, already completed, and will deliver the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism and realistic personal / veicular traffic.

The model is completely open source and its Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with undhreds of thousands of buildings, has ever been pohibitive.

The Turin 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among he buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

Every building of the city is present, with highly realistic graphical details. Flowerbeds, as it is visible from the first images of the prototype, have details of the grass and not a simple green surface.

A powerful automatic traffic generation system, already available as an academic research, will be inserted into the cellular-subdivided city structure. Veichles and people will walk around the streets and boardwalks to bring to life the entire city.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

The Foundation can arrange interactive demonstrations on request, because this product can not be freely distributed yet.

>PID Turin 1706

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Turin in 1706 has been created by Ultramundum Foundation in cooperation with the association "Amici del Museo Pietro Micca" (friends of the Pietro Micca museum) and the Museum itself, with foundings from the Turin City Council, museums division.

This model is derived from 2.0 and 1.0 versions of the contemporary city, already completed, and delivers the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism in each point and with all the details of the situation during the french siege of 1706.

For the 300 years from the french siege of Turin in 1706, Mr. Lupo Jalla of the museums division of Turin City Council and general Guido Amoretti, founder of the Pietro Micca museum, decided to create a digital reconstruction of the city and its surroundings to help the museum guides and complement the large wooden diorama already present in the museum itself. The Pietro Micca museum has been built on the place where this eroic figure sacrificed himself to stop the french break-in into the systems of galleries of the city defences. To stop the enemy he lighted up explosives that had too short a fuse, thus killing himself but saving the city.

The idea started from a series of video installations that mr. Franco Guaschino, director and filmmaker, created to show in an animated and modern way the activities that were carried on into the very large complex of underground galleries under the ancient city fortifications. Guaschino had alredy worked with Ultramundum and knew the PID of contemporary Turin could be an excellent starting point.

The Ultramundum Foundation was enthusiastic of this challenge, because one of the things that need to be clear is that PIDs (or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) are not only 3D, but 4D, with time as the fourth dimension. First, a complete digital 2D cartography, metrical and georeferred, has been created starting from that of the contemporary Turin and superimposing the original versions of any element that was at least 300 years old. Thanks to the enthusiastic cooperation of people from the museum and the association, an extremely accurate cartographic base has been developed by intersections of data from books, maps and even old paintings. It is not completed, but certainly it is a starting point for an ongoing scientific work. It is important to bear in mind that each PID is more a laboratory than a finished product: if even a single element is modified (cartography, images, models, ...) it is possible to restart it and immediately see the result, because all the 3D environment is procedurally generated and thus extremely dynamic.

A large set of precise buildings and details models has been created starting from paintings, documents or wooden models present in the museum. An example is the huge 3D model of the civic tower, at the time the symbol of the city and then destroyed by Napoleon.

The Tabulae of the Automatic generation systems, the true power of the Ultramundum Foundation technologies, have been enhanced to generate farms, residential structures and churches, that were present in a large number in the city. Different Tabulae for medieval and '600 buildings have been developed, with variations for rich, medium and poor level. In this way the buildings of the city appear variated and truly plausible. The boundaries of the different styles and richness levels have been embedded directly into the cartography block by block, street by street or even at single building level.

In the model have also bee reconstructed the walls, the access portals and the roman remnants that were present in 1706 and today are only small ruins.

Ground imagery has been produced from the excellent wooden diorama of the battlefield present in the museum, converted to orthophotos and then used in conjunction with NASA imagery for the more distant parts. All the model is metrical and georeferred, so it has been possible to superimpose on it the contemporary cartography that can be activated with a button. It is amazing to see how much larger the city is today.

Other buttons 'extract' from the ground the galleries that were under the fortifications and can still be explored today from the entrance in the museum. With other buttons they can be moved up and down to study their positions relative to the city walls.

The Maschio, the center of the fortifications and military installations of the time, today is visible only in small fractions. Thanks to this projects for the first time in the world it is possible to explore the fairly complex system of fortifications and terraces that was the standard military defence structure in many cities of the time. It is interesting to position the user on the country ground where the french artillery tried to hit the military installations and not the rest of the city that was to be conquered without too much damage; the lack of a flight view was really a problem.

In the museum there are two installations; in both it is possible to fly over the city, explore it interactively with the 3D Connexion mouse that has six degrees of freedom and launch video documents, created by the Blink company of Franco Guaschino, that depict how pepople lived and struggled at the time.


Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with thousands of buildings, has ever been pohibitive.

The Turin 1706 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.
The Foundation wishes to thank SOFIHA collaudi for the contemporary cartography and Carla Amoretti and Adler Tofanelli for their passion in the creation of that of the 1706.

>PID Turin 1861

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Turin in 1861 has been created by Ultramundum Foundation for the celebrations of the 150 years from the unification of Italy ("Esperienza Italia 150").

This model is derived from 2.0 and 1.0 versions of the contemporary city, already completed, and delivers the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism in each point.

For the 150 years from the unification of Italy the Ultramundum Foundation, partner of the museum of Gianduja project for the celebrations of "Esperienza Italia 150", has created the PID of the city in 1861 to show its status and the evloution of its dimensions and structure from the 1706 version, installed in the Pietro Micca Museum.

The Ultramundum Foundation was enthusiastic of this challenge, because one of the things that need to be clear is that PIDs (or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) are not only 3D, but 4D, with time as the fourth dimension. For the city of Turin now the PIDs of 1706, 1861 and 2006 are available.

First, a complete digital 2D cartography, metrical and georeferred, has been created starting from that of the contemporary Turin and superimposing the original versions of any element that was at least 150 years old. Thanks to the enthusiastic cooperation of volunteers, an accurate cartographic base has been developed by intersections of data from books, maps and even old paintings. It is not completed, but certainly it is a starting point for an ongoing scientific work. It is important to bear in mind that each PID is more a laboratory than a finished product: if even a single element is modified (cartography, images, models, ...) it is possible to restart it and immediately see the result, because all the 3D environment is procedurally generated and thus extremely dynamic.

A large set of precise buildings and details models has been created starting from paintings, documents or wooden models.

Ground imagery has been produced from the wooden dioramas interpolated with old paintings, converted to orthophotos and then used in conjunction with NASA imagery for the more distant parts. All the model is metrical and georeferred, so it is possible to superimpose on it the contemporary cartography.

The model has been presented to the "Italia 150" committee that appreciated the quality of the work.



Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with thousands of buildings, has ever been pohibitive.

The Turin 1861 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

>Planetwide simulation technologies

Images archive

The 3D models (PIDs or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) developed and under development by Ultramundum Foundation deliver extremely large areas for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism and realistic personal / veicular traffic.

The dimensions of the explorable environments reach far beyond what is possible today, for example in the latest videogames, arriving to entire planets.

Larger planetary complexes can be simulated, arriving to star systems and groups of stars. The technologies that can produce such a huge level of simulations are called PlanetWide PIDs (PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas). They allow the exploration of a celestial body of any dimension from space down to ground level, finding human-scale details and reaching even the atomic and subatomic level. The supported range on the UltraPort platform of the Ultramundum Foundation goes from 50 billions light years down to one thousandth of the dimension of cosmic strings, presumably the smallest component of matter.

PIDs are completely open source and their Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Thanks to the patented UltraPeg technology and the geographical Automatic Detail generators, PIDs offer an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk amont he buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

To create this kind of products, new software modules and procedures have been developed, beyond the base procedural parametric technology UltraPeg based on Tabulae.

First, UltraPort supports the jerarchical cellular decomposition of the surface of entire planets; this is achived with the PlanetSector system. It is composed by Tabulae that are capable of automatically generate jearchical planetary surfaces, subdiving progressively in subelements of the same type near the user's Avatar and so producing a variable detail rpresentation of the entire celestial body. In this way, near the observer the terrain appears extremely detailed and the resolution lowers toward the horizon, where there are farther portions; the user-perceived resolution appears constant. An entire planet can be explored interactively and appear highly detailed everywhere, even on low power and memory PCs. The jerarchical PlanetSectors structure id dynamic: when the observer moves, the PlanetSectors toward his direction subdivide in others more detailed, while those at the back are substituted by thier lower-resolution ancestors. The resulting structure is highly dynamic and automatically modifies itself when the Avatar moves, producing entire star systems that allow any kind of trips.

PlanetSectors thus represent portions of the planetary surface progressively more detailed. They start from level zero, that covers the entire planet. Level 1 is composed by two PlanetSectors, one for the north emisphere and one for the south. Level 2 is made by six PlanetSectors, three for each emisphere. From level 3 onwards each PlanetSector subdivides in four for each successive level, up to the maximum resolution. With this technology the temperate regions PlanetSectors, where most of the cities are, have approximately a square shape when projected on the planet spheroid, while the others are progressively mre distorted.

A specific UltraPort module dynamically subdivides the Planetectors where the Avatar is, leaving the farther away ones at a lower level, generating a variable detail structure that shows an apparently extremely high resolution in any point of the planet. Sophisticated systems position the PlanetSectors are 'plates' on the planet spheroid and convert from euclidean coordinates to non-euclidean ones on a sphere, using all the cartographic conventions.

A special debug mode can be activated to see the PlanetSector bounding boxes and coordinates. The coordinate of each planet sector is made from 3 numbers: the PlanetSecor level (0 for the entire planet, 1 for the emisphere, ...), the longitude and the latitude in PlanetSectors form Greenwich and the South pole.

A special debug camera can fly independently of the Avatar position, so that views of the PlanetSectors strcture can be obtained. Without it, the system would continuously update the scene to show a detailed view everywhere the Avatar moves.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Turin city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The source file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time. UltraTools is distributed as open source and so can be easily adjusted for any data format.

>PID Rome 64AD

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Rome in 64 AD is under development by Ultramundum Foundation.

This model is derived from the complete model of contemporary Rome, already completed, and will deliver the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer.
It is a very ambitious project, that until today has brought to the creation of the entire central area around the Colosseum and part of the DOmus Aurea of Nero. The currently modeled area is roughly one square chilometer and encompasses the Colosseum, the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Arch of Constatntine, the Meta Sudans fountain, the temple of Eliogabalium, the Ludus Magnus, the Temple of the Divine Claudius and the Forum Pacis.

All the objects are geopositioned and metrical. The Foundation has been able to create an accurate 3D cartography of the city at the time of Constantinum thanks to the placement of the existing ruins over the contemporary city planimetric data and additional informations got from a number of sources and 'in situ' measurements.

Testings on the field, done also with the Time Machine Visor of the Foundation, have shown a precise superimposing of the model on the structures still existing in Rome.

The PID of Rome in 64 AD has a time coordinate of the moment when the emperor was Nero and the monumental richness of the city was high, with the Domus Aurea as the most precious monument. Thanks to this project and the other two to recreate Rome in 320 Ad and 820 BC, we can say that the model of Rome of the Ultramundum Foundaion has not only 3, but 4 dimensions. The fouth dimension is the time and this is the first tangible part of the 4DGea project, the quadrimensional model of the planet.

DOMUS AUREAIn latin “Golden House”, was a big landscaped portico villa built by emperor Nero after the great fire of Rome in 64 AD. The house was built in the same place where the Colosseum and the Temple of Venus and Rome have been after the suicide of Nero in 68 AD; its artificial lake became the base of the Colosseum after been filled, but leaving the flooding system to allow for simulated naval battles (naumachie), an idea of Nero.The emperor gave the best parties ever, with exotic surprises and rose petals falling from the ceiling while music and dancers were playing. It is said that a guest even drowned in them! The house was really golden, with precious decorations everywhere, “finally, a real housefor a man”, as Nero once said.

The model is completely open source and its Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model with tens of thousands of buildings, like ancient Rome, was prohibitive.

The Rome 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk amont he buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

Every building of the city is present, with highly realistic graphical details. Flowerbeds, as it is visible from the first images of the prototype, have details of the grass and not a simple green surface.

A powerful automatic traffic generation system, already available as an academic research, will be inserted into the cellular-subdivided city structure. Veichles and people will walk around the streets and boardwalks to bring to life the entire city.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Rome city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

>PID Rome 320AD

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Rome in 320 AD is under development by Ultramundum Foundation.

This model is derived from the complete model of contemporary Rome, already completed, and will deliver the entire city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism and realistic personal / veicular traffic.
It is a very ambitious project, that until today has brought to the creation of the entire central area around the Colosseum. The currently modeled area is roughly one square chilometer and encompasses the Colosseum, the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Arch of Constatntine, the Meta Sudans fountain, the temple of Eliogabalium, the Ludus Magnus, the Temple of the Divine Claudius and the Forum Pacis.

All the objects are geopositioned and metrical. The Foundation has been able to create an accurate 3D cartography of the city at the time of Constantinum thanks to the placement of the existing ruins over the contemporary city planimetric data and additional informations got from a number of sources and 'in situ' measurements.

Testings on the field, done also with the Time Machine Visor of the Foundation, have shown a precise superimposing of the model on the structures still existing in Rome.

The PID of Rome in 320 AD has a time coordinate of the moment when the emperor was Constantinum and the monumental richness of the city was at its maximum. Thanks to this project and the other two to recreate Rome in 64 Ad and 820 BC, we can say that the model of Rome of the Ultramundum Foundaion has not only 3, but 4 dimensions. The fouth dimension is the time and this is the first tangible part of the 4DGea project, the quadrimensional model of the planet.

The model is completely open source and its Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model with tens of thousands of buildings, like ancient Rome, was prohibitive.

The Rome 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to patented UltraPeg technology, this model offers an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk amont he buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

Every building of the city is present, with highly realistic graphical details. Flowerbeds, as it is visible from the first images of the prototype, have details of the grass and not a simple green surface.

A powerful automatic traffic generation system, already available as an academic research, will be inserted into the cellular-subdivided city structure. Veichles and people will walk around the streets and boardwalks to bring to life the entire city.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Rome city model, informations on buildings positions, root maps, olympic areas placements and specific schematics have been imported from Autocad files and other databases.

The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

>PID Rome 830BC

Images archive

The 3D model (PID or PlanetaryInteractiveDiorama) of the city of Rome in 830 BC is under development by Ultramundum Foundation.

This model is derived from the complete model of contemporary Rome, already completed, and will deliver the entire area of the city for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer.
It is a very ambitious project, that will recreate the city over the centuries.

The PID of Rome in 830 BC has a time coordinate of the moment when the population of the Sabini was inhabiting the area, before the foundation of Rome.

The model is completely open source and its Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model with tens of thousands of buildings, like ancient Rome, was prohibitive.

The Rome 3D model allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

>Rome ultravision 4D commercial DVD

Images archive

Ultravision4D Rome was an idea of Fulvio Dominici Carnino, president of Ultramundum Foundation. Starting from the ongiong work for the PID (Intractive Planetary Diorama) of contemporary Rome, it has been possible to publish a first commercial product based on the Ultravision exploration of the monumental places of the city already created.

Thanks to the Ultravision technique and the Spectator module, in conjunction with the UltraPort realtime 3D interactive rendering, a new documentary product has been created that allows the free exploration as well as the guided narration of the most important points of the city.

The Ultravision4D Rome became a commercial product with the collaboration of three partners:
1)So.fi.ha Collaudi s.r.l., for more than 20 years So.fi.ha is working in the field of technology.
In particular now it works in: Software Development (Software for Mobile Devices, Software for Cartography, Client/Server Systems), Cartography (Terrain 3D Model, Ground Classification Model, Buildings 3D models, Architectural Buildings Models, Maps, Photogrammetric maps) Photovoltaic and Geothermic Plants, and Plants for Construction;

2)The Ultramundum Foundation.

3)Vision s.r.l., since 1959 the Italian publishing house Vision ha been applying a patented system which consists of printing on trasparent material the image of reconstruction of the ruins of an ancient monument or of archaeological area, in such a way as to overlay this reconstruction on a photograph of the same subject in its present state. This system is the only one wich can give a simple and clear vision of a monument as it was before its destruction and as it is now, since it allows for an immediate and direct comparison between "Past and Present".

For each model subject or monumental area completely modelled in a 3D space, and shown the way we actually see it today, is possible to:
* Freely navigate inside the 3D space and in the monumental areas in two modes: flying or walking;
* Look at animated videos which can be selected from a sub-menu or from the navigation window, which narrate the history and the artistic features of each monument along evocative itineraries;
* Visualize historical reconstructions of the monuments through 2D images suitably overlaid over the models, which will appear inside the animated videos, thus allowing the user to have a "Past & Present" vision and understand how they originally looked like;
* Read the texts related to every subject of the 3D model.

Important facts are:
* 10 3D MONUMENTAL SITES (Sant'Angelo Castle and bridge, Roman Forum and Imperial Fora, Tiber Island, Campidoglio Piazza, Colosseum Square, Navona piazza, Quirinal piazza, Spanish square and steps, Pantheon square (piazza della Rotonda), Trevi Fountain and piazza);
* 17 2D "PAST & PRESENT" SEE-THROUGH RECONSTRUCTIONS;
* More than 50 INTERACTIVE GUIDED TOURS (Animated Videos);
* Free Navigation in a 3D space.

>SMAT aerospace

Images archive

The SMAT F1 project, founded by the Piedmont regional government and with partners like Alenia aerospace, Selex Finmeccanica, Turin Politecnico and others, produced a group of drones (unmanned airplanes) for ground observation and disasters prevention. The complex control and telemetry system is based on a computer network that controls from the ground any part of the mission. The visualization of the airplanes positions and of the data of many sensors on a 3D screen has been provided by the UltraPort platform of the Ultramundum foundation.

Thanks to its extensive capabilities of 3D realtime representation of geographical models up to planetary scale, the ground control and visualization system allowed the positioning of each drone in the fly zone, with options to follow the veichle, observe all the area and even virtually fly anywhere from space to ground.

In the interactive 3D world UltraPort has allowed the visualization of fly paths, of sensors-covered areas and any other element that could be important or pose a threat to the fly, all in a metrical and geo-referred manner.

The 3D models (PIDs or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) of entire cities developed and under development by Ultramundum Foundation deliver extremely large urban areas for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism.

Until today, only portions of a city have been modeled with similar tecnologies, because the data load for a model such this, with undhreds of thousands of buildings, has ever been pohibitive.
PIDs allows for interactive exploration on a standard personal computer with a modern video card. Out-of-ordinary powerful computers are not necessary.

Thanks to the patented UltraPeg technology and the geographical Automatic Detail geenrators, PIDs offer an interactive flight on all the city with the possibility of descent to the ground level of any single street to walk among the buildings. Getting altitude the speed increases accordingly to allow for an exploration experience easy and really natural.

To create this kind of products, new software modules and procedures have been developed, beyond the base procedural parametric technology UltraPeg based on Tabulae.

First, UltraPort supports the jerarchical cellular decomposition of the surface of entire planets; this is achived with the PlanetSector system. It is composed by Tabulae that are capable of automatically generate jearchical planetary surfaces, subdiving progressively in subelements of the same type near the user's Avatar and so producing a variable detail rpresentation of the entire celestial body. In this way, near the observer the terrain appears extremely detailed and the resolution lowers toward the horizon, where there are farther portions; the user-perceived resolution appears constant. An entire planet can be explored interactively and appear highly detailed everywhere, even on low power and memory PCs. The jerarchical PlanetSectors structure id dynamic: when the observer moves, the PlanetSectors toward his direction subdivide in others more detailed, while those at the back are substituted by thier lower-resolution ancestors. The resulting structure is highly dynamic and automatically modifies itself when the Avatar moves, producing entire star systems that allow any kind of trips.
it, the system would continuously update the scene to show a detailed view everywhere the Avatar moves.

An automatic generation is needed to visualize every building of a city with highly realistic graphical details. Just think about the fact that a city like Turin has more than one hundred thousands buildings and Rome has more that five hundred thousands: it is clear that it is not possible to employ a human modeler, that would need an extremely large number of work hours.
The Automatic Buildings Generator is the answer to this problem. It is a set of Tabulae that is capable of producing buildings from cartographic data imported by the open source software UltraTools. Import is all about jerarchical subdivision of the buildings set on the basis of the largest portion of the base on each PlanetSector. Then an analisys module produces the estimated roof structure. All these informations are inserted into a geographical database that is processed by the Automatic Buildings Generator.


The Autocad file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time.

>SPECTATOR - ultravision player

Images archive

Spectator is the name of the Tabula at the heart of Ultravision. It is a very complex module that has many parameters, even if it is really easy to use.

When it is needed to allow a user to explore a 3D realtime environment made with UltraPort, it is a good practice to use the Ultravision paradigm and the best choice to handle it is Spectator.

Remember that Ultavision is a way of exploring any 3D content in UltraPort that allows the free interactive exploration as well as the guided narration while the user can switch any moment from one to the other at will.

In may development years on products of Ultramundum and other organizations, many shown on its site, the Foundation has created and deeply enhanced the Spectator module. Today this Tabula offers a complete management of any request that may arise during the development of realtime 3D interactive contents. The extensive parameters set makes Spectator completely configurable; its graphical image can be changed as well as its behaviour.

Spectator is instanced as any other Tabula and automatically manages its GUI (Graphical User Interface), communicating with the 'mother' Tabula by messages that can modify its workings or may be notifications sent in realtime.

The services offered to the user by Spectator are:
1) A control panel extremely similar to that of a standard media player, with PLAY, PAUSE, REW, FF buttons and a clickable chapters bar to quickly switch from one to another.
2) Processing of the user's click on PLAY button that starts the audio base (if present) and the automatic camera movement for an experience identical to that of a normal documentary, even if it is not a movie but a preprogrammed realtime 'trip' in a 3D realtime model. For example: in the Colosseum model it starts orbiting around it while a voice starts telling its story.
3) Processing of the click on the pause button in any moment. The really important difference from a traditional media player, for instance the play of a video, is that during the pause the user is not in front of a fixed frame of a sequence, but in a point of a trajectory in space. The user can look around simply by moving the mouse (or dragging with the finger in touch systems like LIMs: Interactive Multimedia Whiteboards); the changing in the angle of vision does not move the position of the user that is 'anchored' at the point in the trajectory where he was when the pause button was clicked. The audio base (if present) is stopped. For example: clicking on the pause button the movement around the Colosseum stops, at a certaing height on the side of the monument and it is possible to look around to see how far is from the ground.
4) Processing of the sequence restart: at the clik on the play button the audio base (if present) restarts and also the camera movement goes on exactly from the point it stopped. For example: the voice continues to tell the story of the Colosseum and the camera goes on orbiting around it.
5) Processing of the FLY mode (starting from pause): the user can still look around, but by rolling the mouse weel (or touching the Go and BACK buttons in touch systems like LIMs: Interactive Multimedia Whiteboards) he can move in the 3D environment. For example: flying from the outside to the inside of the Colosseum, crossing over the walls. At the click on the PLAY button Spectator goes on with the speech and the camera goes on orbiting.
5) Processing of the WALK mode (starting from pause): the user can still look around, but by rolling the mouse weel (or touching the Go and BACK buttons in touch systems like LIMs: Interactive Multimedia Whiteboards) he can move in the 3D environment. Unlike the FLY mode, he is automatically positioned on the first surface of the model below and is vertically anchored. It is possible to walk on the surfaces of the model but not to fly in the air. For example: walking on the floors of the Colosseum and going up/down on the stairs. At the click on the PLAY button Spectator goes on with the speech and the camera goes on orbiting.
6) Processing of the EASY_GOTO function: if the user double clicks (or taps two times in touch systems like LIMs), he is automatically positioned with a fluid movement on the front of the clicked object, in orthogonal position at a specified distance. This feature is extremely important in large environments (like, for instance, the Roman Forum or the whole 3D Italy) where it would be tricky to reach a far away point at the reduced speed of the FLY/WALK modes. It is also difficult for many users to position themselves exactly orthogonal to an interesting point (for instant a fresco); with this feature Spectator offers a spectacular and convenient solution to all these problems.


The services offered to the developer by Spectator are:
1) Easy insertion into any application: it is possible to simply instance the Tabula and let it do all the work, without any other interaction and leaving most of its parameters at default values.
2) Easy definition of the control points the camera has to pass through in each sequence. It is enough to just create an array of coordinates for each chapter that can be defined visually with the UltraPort tool UltraEasy3D. By just moving in the 3D world it is possible to stop at each path point and 'record' the current position and orientation: During the play of the sequence Spectatore will interpolate positions and orientations passing from one point to the next with a fluid movement and at a speed or in a time that can be specificed segment by segment. With this system is really easy and intuitive to be a director!
3) Complet control on the graphical aspect of the GUI panel: it is possible not to set anything leaving Spectator create a basic interface, or set the buttons that are to be included, their dimensions and shapes, if the chapters bar has to be present, the color, dimension and alignment of the Console and so on.
4) Options to add special buttons and controls that harmonically show along those of Spectator.
5) Complete control on the behaviour: it is possible to leave the default, perfectly fit for most of the cases, or set any detail of the user experience; for instance if at the end of a chapter play must automatically start with the next one or stop, if at the end of the last chapter Spectator has to roll back to the first, if play is in loop or single-shot, if the user can fly but not walk and so on.
6) Complete messages-based interface with the mother Tabula: by default Spectator does not send any message, but can be set to signal the start of a sequence, its end, the passage from a segment of a chapter to the next, the user clicking on a button and so on. At the same time the mother Tabula can send messages to Spectator to set the current sequence, start playing, changing the state and so on. This allows changing the state of the environment (for instance showing an image) when the user is listening to a specific point of the story and so on.
7) Complete documentation and many working examples of usage; supporting the UltraPeg philosophy of the 'building block' ready to be used.

Spectator, like any other Foundation Tabula, has an open source and can be freely used in any creation by the terms of the UPL licence.

>Specventure RELOADED

Images archive

It was 1985, the ZX Spectrum was one of the most successful home computers;
the videogame Specventure. distributed all over the world on audio cassettes, was an achievement: for the first time in 48Kbytes of RAM there were 30 levels, 10 selectable background musics and, most of all, was the first videgame ever sold on the international market by an italian: Fulvio Dominici Carnino, currently president of the Ultramundum Foundation.

After 25 years Specventure in coming back in glorious 3D!
Using the Ultramundum realtime interactive technologies a bunch of braves is coding a complete conversion for today's powerful hardwares, creating for the first time a full conversion from an arcade 2D game of the '80s to a 3D FPS (First Person Shooter) adventure of today... to arrive there were no player as ever gone before.

The game will be completely open source and its Tabulae (elements at the base of the technology used) will be freely accessible and modifiable by everybody.

Any Tabula, the data structure at the root of Ultramundum Foundation's UltraPeg technology, can hold multiple data types. For the Specventure RELOADED game original raster image maps have been recovered, while 3D models of the enemies and game elements have been imported from 3DStudio, Maya and Blender files with the Extractor tool, the automatic tabularizator and realtime optimizer that can turn old-style models made into standard modeling packages into UltraPeg technology Tabulae.

This work has seen the cooperation of many students from the Torino university and other schools and is an ongoing effort to create a complete FPS complex game in UltraPort, completely procedural and open. We hope it will be the basis and the inspiration for other developers to create new products.

The Foundation is planning to release the game for Christmas as a gift for all its fans.


Link:

To play the original game in your browser:
WORLDOFSPECTRUM

To see the original game as video:
YOUTUBE


To see the video sneak preview of SpecventureRELOADED:
YOUTUBE

>TimeMachineVisor - the real time machine

Images archive

The real time machine
explore the past of the exact place where you are.
Freely look around as you would with a classic binocular.
Zoom in and out to get any detail.
Get stimulating historical and touristic informations.
esplore the past of the exact place where you are.

Shoot pictures and send them as postcards/emails/Cellphone messages.
Insert people you like in the historical environment.
Extremely easy to use and operate.
Educational and fun.

seen for the first time at DNA Italia, the cultural heritage italian fair, the TIME MACHINE VISOR has been an immediate success.
The ability to explore history from the very point where the user stands has triggered the surprise of eveybody, the friendly look similar to that of the family movies robots was loved by children and the fun and ease of use have been the key to the huge success of the product.

The amazing reconstructions of the past shown by the TIME MACHINE VISOR are made with the revolutionary new technology, called UltraPeg,
created by the Ultramundum Foundation; this technology can generate extremely complex and highly-detailed planetary-scale models explorable down to the street level.
Automatic details generators can build up many of the models needed (for instance boardwalks, trees, buildings) without human intervention. In this way, the creation of the contents shown by the visor is both fast and low-cost.
The Visor hardware is only a part of the price to pay to get the amazing result of looking back in time: the creation of the interactive 3D models has been a real problem until today.
Thanks to UltraPeg technology, the automatic recreation of large-scale (even planetary-scale) environments can start from the simple cartographic or iconographic data available and reach the results shown here for Rome in 320AD.

What is seen inside the Visor is not a video or some kind of 360-degrees image like QuickTime VR, it is a full 3D model rendered in realtime by specialized high-performance hardware.

Is it possible to position the Visor everywhere in the destination place: since the view is a realtime rendering of a complete 3D model, by using the internal position configuration wizard each time it is installed, the Visor is able to show the exact view that would have been visible from its precise location and orientation, in a different time. No need to regenerate images or videos, all is done locally.

The Visor is geo-positioned in latitude and longitude and all measures are metrical, so that the recreated virtual world is precisely superimposed to the phisical one.

The binocular can be moved in pitch(-40/+40 degrees), yaw(-90/+90 degrees) and zoom(1-20x)

The Visor can be installed in a fixed location, Even outside.
It is possible to power the Visor with a voltage from 12VDC to 110VAC to 240VAC, and it is water-resistant

The Visor can be placed in the morning and removed in the evening for non-fixed installations because it is light enough to be brought around by a single man and can be folded for easy transportation. If needed, it can be battery powered and run up to 12 hours then charged during the night.

The Foundation has all the experts needed to create high-quality compelling virtual worlds from any data available and can also provide data from various academic and institutional sources; however, it is possible to insert any exixting model and 2D/3D data of any format to further reduce costs and development time.

A Visor can be a business or can be installed to be used for free; any usage is OK: it is possible to install a Visor in a museum to be used for free by visitors, it is also possible to install it in an open place with a coins reader as a paid service offered to tourists passing by.

>UltraEasy3D - the 3D worlds visual creation tool

Images archive

UltraEasy3D is the name of the tool for the visual creation of scenes and 3D objects in UltraPort.

On the Ultramundum Foundation platform it is possible to create Tabulae, the 'building blocks' of the 3D worlds, in native format writing CarminaC code, ANSI C with extensions for realtime 3D. It is also possible to import models of many different formats created in traditional modeling packages and automatically optimized by the Extractor tool.

Nonetheless, those who do not have C programming skills could not create new Taulae. Thanks to UltraEasy3D this is now possible; it is a way of creating new Tabulae visually and interactively. No programming in any language is needed, it is enough to know how to move in the Foundation's 3D worlds. Being a visual tool, it is also really useful in all those cases when even a programmer would have problems: for instance to position an object aligned with others of the scene in a point whose coordinates are not numerically known. UltraEasy 3D creates 'behind the hood' a CarminaC source code that can be edited, so it is really convenient to visually position elements and then 'copy' their coordinates in numerical format from one source to another.

With UltraEasy3D anybody, without programming, can:
1) Create new Tabulae as aggregates of simpler others, visualy positioned in space.
2) Insert 3D objects in environments already created (for instance PIDs of cities).
3) Insert CAD projects in urban environments to check the final effect and their proportions.
4) Position images on any existing surface of any 3D environment (for instance different facades).
5) Visually find the coordinates of a specific position of the observer and also its space orientation (for instance to define a point the camera will have to pass through during a preprogrammed fly).
6) Position any Tabula visually to then get all the parameters to instance it in another source code.

The main usage of UltraEasy3D is that of inserting additional models in environments already made. The typical situation is that of a PID of a city (for instance Turin as shown in the sample images) where it is needed to check the effect of a new building, a different arrangement of urban elements, a new monument and so on. Usually the operator is not the original author of the environment and has the model in a traditional modelling software. In the sample images it is possible to see the few steps needed to complete this task. It is shown that it is possible to start from a model in 3D Studio, open it in Extractor, save its optimized version in .PUM format, create in the Ingenium development environment a wrapping Tabula that incorporates the .PUM file and then position this Tabula with UltraEasy3D. In the samples it is shown how to create a Tabula of type UltraEasy3D, open it in editing and add two instances ot the model created in the steps before, in two different points and scale factors in SanCarlo Square in Turin. In other example images it is shown how to start from a mechanical drawing in AutoCAD, export it with Extractor and position it in the same square of the city.

UltraEasy3D has also the PORTRAIT function: clicking on triangles of the scene (in the examples the bas-relief of the base of the horse statue in the square) it is possible to define an area to cover with an image (in the examples the penguins sample image of Windows). The function PORTRAIT is really easy and allows the selection of irregular shaped non-planar areas (in the examples a portion of the back of the horse); it is possible to position the image in a variety of ways and manage the transparent and semitransparent parts, when present.

All these functions and many others have been inserted by Ultramundum in the UltraEasy3D tool in many years of tests in the field, often upon direct request or suggestion of the users; it has thus became a slim, simple and intuitive tool, created for and with non-programmers creatives.

>UltraPort - the Ultramundum's Exploration System

Images archive

The first project completed by the Ultramundum Foundation has been UltraPort: the Explorating System for realtime interactive 3D. The mission of the Foundation is the creation of systems to allow human beings to have experiences often impossible in the phisical world; so, as is stated in the Book of Ultramundum, it is a base necessity to create a software capable to generate the digital worlds where everything is possible. The system must also allow the exploration of these contents and so must be something more than a simple Player and something more than a simple traditional development environment.

UltraPort, as stated in the Book of Ultramundum, is the answer to all the requirements of the project of the Foundation. It is not a 3D modeller, it is not a sophisticated development environment, it is not a realtime 3D rendering engine, it is not an innovative browser: it is all this with a modern TV look & feel; something more similar to an Operating Sistem like Windows, Linux or Leopard than to a traditional application.

With UltraPort users can explore in realtime 3D all the creations of the Foundation and third-party developers, with a user experience very similar to that of the most up-to-date products. In the version distributed until today, UltraPort is installed as a standard application or a standard plugin compatible with most of the available browsers. At the end of the installation the specific content is automatically started and the user enjoys it without even knowing that such a sophisticated product is running. Many users run UltraPort without activating its services as a development environment and access the installed content in a simple and natural way. Even only as a 3D realtime rendering engine UltraPort, thanks also to the extreme automatic optimizations of its tools, delivers performances impossible even for many professional products: from the contemporary Rome PID with more thatn five hundred thousands buildings renderend in realtime on the 3D Earth planet model, to the ancient Rome where it is possible to explore the square of the Colosseum that counts more that one million triangles alone, in many cases it has been shown that UltraPort is the only one capable of processing certain contents.

Examples of this type of use are the 4DMoon software of the Foundation that allows the exploration of the entire Moon, distributed for the 40 years from the landing of the first man in 1969 and installed by more that 50000 users worldwide to enjoy a virtual astronautic experience. Another example are the videogames of the Kinder Happy Hippo Talent Show series, distributed on autostarting USB keys in more than two millions copies worldwide. In these installations UltraPort has shown its small footprint, requiring a space of only a few megabytes and without any modification to the Registry or other computer system data. UltraPort runs from its installation directory , does not require any additional or updated component like .NET, DLL, drivers or others and can be removed by simply deleting its directory; it is also possible to launch it from any media, even USB keys, net drives or others. The base philosopy is 'easy activation, no modification of the PC, execution even by non-administrators'. UltraPort has functions to detect the processing power of the system it runs on and automatic systems to generate contents of variable complexity so that it can be satisfactorily executed even on less powerful systems.

For all these installations, UltraPort delivers an extensive GUI (Graphical USer Interface) support, a complete control on the 3D output window (position, dimension, fullscreen, in the browser, ...), an highly fluid interactive 3D experience with support of any device that could be needed (like the 3D connexion mouse or the Interactive whiteboards). Many companies have or are developing on UltraPort because it is a system easy to use, complete, powerful and adjustable for any use. Some 3D realtime rendering engines are specilized for a particular use (races, closed environments, GIS, arcade games), UltraPort is application-neutral: it has no particular requirement and can be used for any application from FPS games to large planet-wide geographical environments to financial analisys systems. The complete diagnostic of any kind of problem, with automatic correction of the error situations, offers a simple and intuitive platform for all clients.


From the developer point of view, each UltraPort installation has the tools needed to convert any user into a successful developer. At the core of the UltraPeg technology there are the Tabulae: kind of 'building blocks' that can be assembled to create the 3D interactive worlds. In UltraPort there are tools to create any kind of Tabula, to import and export their data and to test the contents during the development process. A Tabula content may be only data (for instance a sound) or a microprogram that will be executed to generate the 3D model (for instance a buildings generator for a PID). For the procedural Tabulae UltraPort has the Ingenium tool: a complete professional IDE (Integrated Development Environment) very similar to Microsoft VisualStudio. Developers accustomed with C or C++ development environments like VisualStudio find the same commands, the same error reports and the same development process they already know.

The development of procedural Tabulae is made in CarminaC, a standard ANSI C language with specific extensions for realtime 3D. Ingenium offers a complete programmer-oriented editor that supports all the keyboard and mouse commands available in environments like VisualStudio. The user can write and edit the source codes without the need to learn new commands, so he can be immediately operative. The support to automatic coding help functions, like the automatic bracket indenting and refactoring options, are the same of the modern development environments.

The support to debugging is also complete: Ingenium has breakpoints, symbolic debugging, windows to inspect/modifiy variables, call stack view and the option to click on any report to be brought to the exactly corresponding source code line.

UltraPort has a complete set of GUI (Graphical User Interface) functions with all necessary widgets to create code that interacts with the user in a sophisticated way.

Communication systems with the external environment and other applications are available, so that UltraPort can integrate with any kind of existing software, written in any language. It is possible to exchange data between UltraPort and other processes with a variety of techniques that range from file I/O to direct memory communication; Sample programs that illustrate the various methods are avalable.

Most of the Tabulae are procedural and are responsible for the creation and evolution of the 3D interactive worlds. UltraPort does non only offer a powerful realtime rendering engine, but also an extensive Tabulae execution system based on a series of virtual machines that execute the code. Each UltraPort's virtual machine is executed in a separate thread, fully exploiting multiprocessor and/or hyperthreading hardware and delivering functions typical of an operating system like multitasking preemptive code execution with variable priority support and realtime processing for the critical parts (like the movements in sync with the Camera).

All UltraPort modules are executed in separate threads, so the entire platform exploits multiprocessor and/or hyperthreading hardware, fully using all available processing power. Today, even many commercial videogames are still monothread and do not show significant performance increase on more powerful hardware.

With UltraPort the Foundation offers a series of powerful free or open source tools to import and optimize complex data, like UltraTools for the planetary data and Extractor for the 'classical' 3D models.

UltraPort is distributed under the UPL licence, that offers a free use for non-commercial products and a very low royalty (five per cent) on the earnings generated (only when cashed) for business uses. The revenues thus generated are shared by Ultramundum among the creators of the Tabulae used; an important work opportunity for young creatives and all those that are willing to work on digital interactive realities.

>UltraTools - the OpenSource database importer

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The 3D models (PIDs or PlanetaryInteractiveDioramas) developed and under development by Ultramundum Foundation deliver extremely large areas for free interactive exploration on a standard personal computer, with an extremely high level of realism and realistic personal / veicular traffic.

The dimensions of the explorable environments reach far beyond what is possible today, for example in the latest videogames, arriving to entire planets.

To create this kind of products, new software modules and procedures have been developed, beyond the base procedural parametric technology UltraPeg based on Tabulae.

First, UltraPort supports the jerarchical cellular decomposition of the surface of entire planets; this is achived with the PlanetSector system. It is composed by Tabulae that are capable of automatically generate jearchical planetary surfaces, subdiving progressively in subelements of the same type near the user's Avatar and so producing a variable detail rpresentation of the entire celestial body. In this way, near the observer the terrain appears extremely detailed and the resolution lowers toward the horizon, where there are farther portions; the user-perceived resolution appears constant. An entire planet can be explored interactively and appear highly detailed everywhere, even on low power and memory PCs. The jerarchical PlanetSectors structure id dynamic: when the observer moves, the PlanetSectors toward his direction subdivide in others more detailed, while those at the back are substituted by thier lower-resolution ancestors. The resulting structure is highly dynamic and automatically modifies itself when the Avatar moves, producing entire star systems that allow any kind of trips.

A specific UltraPort module dynamically subdivides the Planetectors where the Avatar is, leaving the farther away ones at a lower level, generating a variable detail structure that shows an apparently extremely high resolution in any point of the planet. Sophisticated systems position the PlanetSectors are 'plates' on the planet spheroid and convert from euclidean coordinates to non-euclidean ones on a sphere, using all the cartographic conventions.

The geographical file importer, called UltraTools, allows for fast and almost automatic acquisition of public databases, converted in a very short time to three-dimensional elements. All these data can then be explored in real-time. UltraTools is distributed as open source and so can be easily adjusted for any data format.

UltraTools is capable of generating a number of standard data formats, that can then became Tabulae contents (for instant profiles defined as polilines in AutoCAD) or be processed to generate planetary databases.

UltraTools can process huge source databases in different formats defining cartographic vector (strrets borders, buildings, ground utilization, boundaries of cities, regions and countries) and raster (georeferred imagery from an entire planet to a single car) data to create the sets used by PIDs to generate entire planets, countries and cities.

UltraTools is a comman-line application written in C++ and can be compiled on any platform. Its structure is completely object-oriented so that new functions and/or new source data formats can be easily added.

>Virtual Italy

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The VIRTUAL ITALY project is aimed at the production of a four-dimensional model of Italy, where the fourth dimension is time.

This project will provide for an ultravision channel where the three-dimensional model of Italy will be freely explorable in Internet with a normal personal computer.
It will be possible to travel back in time while elements of the environment will change accordingly, a sort of virtual time machine.

It will be the first time an entire country is modeled in 3D with time exploration. If we remember that Italy holds half of the cultural heritage of the world, the enormous cultural value of the project becames evident.

Thanks to the Ultramundum patented technology the Virtual Italy model will be the first to be available on the Internet in interactive 3D with high details. Traditional 3D techniques require long download times or CD-Rom distribution, while this new technology will provide a live interactive model everywhere on the planet at high speed.

The platform will be enriched in time with new multimedia elements, creating a sort of four-dimensional encichlopaedia of Italy.

An high volume of traffic is expected, making the product extremely interesting for sponsors and people wanting to insert their names in one of the biggest collection of masterpieces of mankind.

Somebody could say that similar products already exist, for example 'Google Earth'; but this project is different, it is completely procedural and its capable of creating the ground details so that the generated models are at the same level of those fond into the more advanced videogames. All 'traditional' products rely on photographs that, even at the highest resolutions, can not deliver the semantic representation that is needed for a believable ground visualization. This is an european product, completely developed in Italy, and deserves attention for its potential in this sector.

the Ultramundum Foundation has been developing this project for a long time, with the only help of volunteers and the academic world, reaching a level of development where it is at pair with similar products created in nations where there are serious founds for the research and development in this field. We hope the help of many people will continue, to create something really different and better in such an innovative and important field.

For more details, visit the project's site.