Creating immersive digital landscapes using computer vision

Based on work at the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center in UC Santa Barbara, I developed a method for digitizing real-world landscapes as interactive 3D virtual environments. This method recreates the sights and sounds of a place, then allows users to navigate and interact with the environment as if they were actually in situ. Using only a kite, a camera, and a few easy-to-use software packages, anyone can record their experiences of a landscape and share them with others as easily as they might share an image or a video.

This project builds on the research of Kitty Currier, a PhD candidate in Geography at UC Santa Barbara. By using a kite to take aerial photographs and then processing those photographs with computer vision software, Kitty produced a low-cost, high-resolution 3D model of an Indonesian island. I have extended Kitty’s process by representing the 3D model within a video game engine and thoroughly documented my work flow so that it can be replicated by anyone, regardless of technical background.

The full process is documented in a chapter of the book Geogames and Geoplay (Springer, 2018).

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