Virtual Sardinia: A large-scale hypermedia regional information system

The Virtual Sardinia project aims at collecting a large amount of heterogeneous data concerning the island of Sardinia and representing them in such a way that a casual user can easily navigate through them in a virtual trip. All these data are interconnected in an hypermedia way, browsable in the World-wide Web, ranging from geographic to archaeological data, from historical to touristical information, both in 2D and 3D. One of the central components of Virtual Sardinia is i3D, a high-speed 3D scene viewer for the World-wide Web. Using a Spaceball, the user can intuitively navigate with continuous viewpoint control inside three-dimensional data, while selecting 3D objects with the mouse triggers requests for access to remote media documents that can be distributed over the Internet. This allows to explore interactively a three-dimensional reconstruction of the island of Sardinia built from a digital terrain model texture-mapped with satellite images. Alternate interactive views of the model are provided in the form of movies, sequences, or clickable maps. The combination of these models becomes a natural front-end for querying all kinds of scientific, cultural, and touristic information about Sardinia. We believe that this approach opens a new way to create regional information systems easily available that could be made available to the general public.