VIRTUAL ITALY

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.