PID Turin 2.0

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.