GRIFINOR: Integrated Object-Oriented Solution for Navigating Real-Time 3D Virtual Environments

The ability to navigate a 3d virtual environment in real-time has a high priority in connection with different applications for disaster management. This paper presents GRIFINOR - a platform for applications within this area. As part of GRIFINOR, three new innovations have been promoted. They are presented in this paper as well. In many situations it is important that geoinformation can be accessible for queries within a very short timeframe (minutes). Questions about spatial reasoning and volumetric calculations in connection with different types of simulation has been very dependent on a priori models and very fast computer graphics hardware and software. It is also essential that the features of the model become real objects with attributes etc. Urban 3d models have traditionally been built as wire frame models. This makes it very difficult and in some situations impossible to attach geoinformation to the spatial structure in a way so that it is useful for real-time navigation in 3d. These wire frame models are not suitable for either a connection to a spatial database or for spatial queries. Center for 3D Geoinformation at Aalborg University is developing a system that handles 3Ddata structures as objects with facilities to support real-time geovisualization. The need for a new concept in this area has been one of the major motivations for the development og GRIFINOR. Instead of dealing with simple geometry in a CAD-based environment GRIFINOR is developed to support object-oriented technology.