Immersive Street-level Social Media in the 3D Virtual City

Geollery

“…We direct readers to a thorough survey [45] for urban reconstructions. As discussed in Section 1, recent research offers more practical solutions to integrate geotagged social media with street-level panoramas [18], pre-reconstructed cities in several minutes [7], and virtual city or terrain models [3,6,30]. However, generating 3D models for the city is not quite applicable to real-time applications.…”

“…As for human factors in 3D social media platforms, Kukka et al [30] conduct a pioneering qualitative anticipated user experience study with 14 participants to explore the design space of geospatial visualization of social media in mirror worlds. Badri et al [3] further evaluate a banner editor system for adding and visualizing social media banners in Virtu-alOulu, a virtual digital city.…”

“…Recently, several technologies and designs [7,18,30] (Figure 2) have emerged for visualizing social media in mirrored worlds 1 [21]. Nevertheless, designing an interactive social platform with immersive geographical environments remains a challenge due to the real-time constraints of rendering 3D buildings.…”

“…However, their system requires 113 -457 minutes to reconstruct each city and lacks the interactivity with online users. Kukka et al [30] have presented the conceptual design of visualizing streetlevel social media in a 3D virtual city, VirtualOulu [2]. However, such pre-designed 3D city models are not practical for deployment in larger areas.…”

“…The quantitative evaluation and individual responses reveal the strengths and 1 A mirrored world is defined as "a representation of the real world in digital form [which] attempts to map real-world structures in a geographically accurate way" [49]. shows Social Street View [18], a real-time system which depicts social media as billboards via maximal Poisson-disk sampling [26], (b) shows Bulbul and Dahyot's offline system [7] which leverages virtual lighting to visualize popularity and sentiments of social media, (c) shows the conceptual design by Kukka et al [30], which explores presentation manner, visibility, organization, and privacy during co-design activities, and (d) shows our results in Geollery, which fuses 3D textured buildings, geotagged social media, and virtual avatars in real time.…”