The Web currently hosts a vast amount of 2D images and 3D building models.Each repository has its own data structure and a limited set of semantics according to their own needs. With the advent of Semantic Web Technologies, the opportunity arises to combine these heterogeneous data sets and publish them as Linked Data. It is within the scope of this research to investigate whether online 2D and 3D content can be enriched, published and reused as RDF. The emphasis of this work is on extracting building component information from online building geometry and publishing it as Linked Data. An interpretation framework is presented that takes as input any building mesh and computes its building components through machine learning techniques. Additionally, a Structure-from-Motion pipeline is proposed that provides similar outputs and links the 2D imagery to the reconstructed 3D building geometry. The experiments show that, even though the building content originates from different sources and was not modeled according to any standards, building geometry in online repositories and photogrammetric reconstructions can be semantically enriched with component information using terminology from Linked Building Data ontologies such as BOT, PRODUCT and OMG/FOG/GOM. This is an important step towards making structureless geometric information retrievable, linkable and thus reusable over the Web.

Architecture, Design and Virtual Reality game creation companies are in great need of acquiring, re-using and re-purposing visual and textual data to recreate, renovate or produce a novel target space, building or element. This come in align with the abrupt increase, which is lately observed, in the use of immersive VR environments and the great technological advance that can be found in the acquisition and manipulation of digital models. V4Design is a new project that takes into account these needs and intends to build a complete and robust design solution that will help the targeted industries to improve their creation process.

Nowadays vast amounts of multimedia content is being produced, archived and digitised, resulting in great troves of data of interest. Examples include user-generated content, such as images, videos, text and audio posted by users on social media and wikis, or content provided through official publishers and distributors, such as digital libraries, organisations and online museums. This digital content can serve as a valuable source of inspiration to the creative industries, such as architecture and gaming, to produce new innovative assets or to enhance and (re-)use existing ones. However, in its current form, this content is difficult to be reused and repurposed due to the lack of appropriate solutions for its retrieval, analysis and integration into the design process. In this paper we present V4Design, a novel framework for the automatic content analysis, linking and seamless transformation of heterogeneous multimedia content to help architects and virtual reality game designers establish innovative value chains and end-user applications. By integrating and intelligently combining state-of-the-art technologies in computer vision, 3D generation, text analysis, generation and semantic integration and interlinking, V4Design provides architects and video game designers with innovative tools to draw inspiration from archive footage and documentaries, inspiring and eventually supporting the design process.

Virtual reality games demand the use of highly realistic 3D models to provide an immersive environment to the users. Therefor, modeling of real world structures is a common process within the industry. In recent years the photogrammetric tools have become available to aid in this process. However, obtaining high quality imagery is still an issue w.r.t. budget and time constraints. We present a simple, effective method for the reuse of existing video and photo material towards the generation of 3D models suitable for a virtual reality gaming environment. An abundance of existing content may be available in on-line repositories (YouTube, Flickr, Google images,..) and can be exploited. A complete video-to-VR pipeline is presented and a use-case of the Berlin Gendarmenmarkt square is tested, wherein the use of both commercial and open source software is evaluated. Our proposed method improves existing workflows used by VR game designers in both structural accuracy and creation time of real world objects.