Virtual reality for cultural landscape visualization

Abstract

International audienceAlthough land managers and policy-makers generally have a good experience of what result can be expected from their decisions, they are often faced with difficulty when trying to communicate the visual impact of a management option to stakeholders, particularly when the landscape exhibits a high cultural value. Three-dimensional visualization of the landscape is often used for communicating with the stakeholders. A challenge in participatory methods for integrated assessment and policy planning is to view future changes in land use, according to scenarios. A 3-D landscape visualization component, SLE ("Seamless Landscape Explorer"), has been developed, which is launched after a scenario simulation to allow for exploration of landscape changes. Pressures causing such changes are translated into changes in the spatial configuration of the landscape. The different types of land-use are visualized thanks to a library of detailed textures, and vegetation can be added. This has been applied to a study of four scenarios in the French Mediterranean region, which were set up as part of a participatory process for discussing the planning of the regional peri-urban and agricultural policy, in an area dominated by the typical culturally sensitive Mediterranean matorral, ("garrigue" shrubland) surrounding the Pic Saint-Loup mountain. Examples of visualization are shown and discussed here

Connecting an architectural plant model to a forest stand dynamics model—application to Austrian black pine stand visualization

“…Many different visualization approaches have been developed, as described by Pretzsch et al (2008). Some can provide interactive real-time visualizations and free perspectives (Lim and Honjo 2003;Griffon et al 2011). In most approaches, the individual tree development is poorly represented, if at all.…”

“…It is becoming increasingly important to take in account individual tree structure in forest management for different objectives, including for example carbon allocation and sequestration (Melson et al 2011), fuel description for fire risk assessment (Parsons et al 2011), stand or landscape visualization (Griffon et al 2011) or for calibrating models for remote sensing applications (Castel et al 2001;Biliouris et al 2009). …”

Integrating Spatially Explicit Representations of Landscape Perceptions into Land Change Research

“…Augmented photos and other visualizations have been used to evaluate and discuss alternative planning options for specific locations [e.g., 117], including examination of the impacts of potential land-management options on people's perceptions [e.g., 46,118,119]. Spatially explicit land change scenarios can also be translated into 3D landscape visualizations that can then be evaluated by stakeholders [120,121]. Further, social-value maps based on landscape characteristics readily lend themselves to this type of geographic scenario analysis.…”

Method of retrospective evaluation of physiognomic landscape changes and its application in the West Polesie region (CE Poland)

“…Since the 1990s, GIS techniques have been more and more extensively used in the evaluation of landscape physiognomy (Lee et al 1999;Wu et al 2006;Ramirez et al 2011), along with 3D computer visualisations (Roth 2006;Griffon et al 2011).…”