Visualisation and analysis of the urban built-up area with VRML

The Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) is a file format for describing interactive 3D objects and worlds. VRML is designed to be used on the Internet, intranets, and local client systems. VRML is also intended to be a universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. VRML may be used in a variety of application areas such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds.VRML is capable of representing static and animated dynamic 3D and multimedia objects with hyperlinks to other media such as text, sounds, movies, and images. VRML browsers, as well as authoring tools for the creation of VRML files, are widely available for many different platforms. VRML supports an extensibility model that allows new dynamic 3D objects to be defined allowing application communities to develop interoperable extensions to the base standard. There are mappings between VRML objects and commonly used 3D application programmer interface (API) features.VRML is useful for a variety of applications, including data visualization , financial analysis, entertainment, education, distributed simulatio, computer-aided design, product marketing, virtual malls, user interfaces to information, scientific visualization.Data visualization turns numbers into a 3D VRML world. It takes a complex database with lots of numerical information and turns it into a three-dimensional environment, which may have a time dimension. Even interactive features and sound can represent information.Financial analysis can use data visualization to visualize financial data, such as stock prices or corporate financial accounts. Anomalies and opportunities can be detected by highlighted areas in the data set.Entertainment is a potential goldmine for VRML developers, since VRML allows for interactive, 3D movies. VRML allows customized, dynamically-generated camera angles with alternate scenarios possible.Education with VRML can give people a chance to learn something in a new way, or learn a real-life job without the dangers of physical machinery.Distributed Simulation can use multi-user VRML worlds over networks to simulate military exercises or industrial courses.Computer-Aided Design is an area where designers could collaborate on designing industrial parts or other 3D objects in a shared multi-user space. Or alternatively, they can e-mail parts back and forth to each other, or put drafts up on Web servers for comments.Product Marketing often tries to reach buyers at an emotional level. VRML is great way to do this, for the same reasons that it will be successful in entertainment applications. In addition, marketers selling 3-dimensional products like clothes can give buyers an impression of the object before they purchase it.As User Interfaces to Information, VRML can help bring some sense to the confusing hypermedia world of the Web, and to massive databases packed with more information than can be easily represented textually.In Scientific Visualization, researchers or students can observe a 3D protein hovering in space and click on parts of it to learn about the function of the parts of the protein through hyperlinks to a database. In fact, Aereal Inc. is currently working on this for the Genetic Information Bank of Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Sciences.