Coastscapes for a Metaverse: From height maps to virtual vegetated environments

Abstract

Communicating environmental changes and scenarios to stakeholders and decision-makers can be challenging. Immersive environments offer a novel tool to transfer knowledge and allow the interactive discussion of scenarios. With the increase of space- and airborne remote sensing and coherent classification of ecosystems, many large-scale geospatial datasets are produced. Virtual environments can play an important role in conveying and discussing the findings gathered from these datasets. However, textured meshes and point clouds directly imported to a virtual reality are not always suited to create a truly immersive environment and often poste geometrical artifacts, which are miss-interpreted during the import to a game engine. In our study, we use an asset-based approach to create an immersive virtual representation of a coastscape. The focus hereby is on the coastal vegetation and changes in species distribution, potentially triggered by climate change impacts. We present an easy-to-use blueprint for the game engine EPIC Unreal Engine 5. In contrast to traditional virtual reality environments using static textured mesh data derived from photogrammetry, this asset-based approach enables the use of dynamics and physical properties (e.g. vegetation moving due to wind or waves) which makes the virtual environment more immersive.