Writing this blog entry from Innsbruck, Austria where yesterday I presented a publication of mine for the 10th IASTED Computer Graphics And Imaging conference (the publication itself can be found here, more details on it on a previous blog entry too, here). One of the most interesting things I saw while at the conference was a demo on a Nokia N95 of the m-LOMA project from a fellow conference attendee which really caught my interest.
The m-LOMA application is one of the first full-featured mobile 3D maps. In comparison to 2D maps, 3D maps offer recognizability via a more realistic representation. m-LOMA, mobile LOcation-aware Messaging Application, delivers a real urban virtual environment to mobile users, with optimized wireless networking and efficient rendering. It allows entire cities to be rendered in real-time in mobile devices, even those lacking 3D hardware. It supports both vector and raster 2D maps, and navigation features such as GPS and routing. It also acts as a platform for location-dependent information.
Users can annotate the 3D world with their messages, and even track their GPS enabled buddies. The environment can also be annotated by service providers, which can be queried directly from the 3D view via the associated logos, or via textual searches. In addition, any annotation attached to a building is linked to the entire building, the location is not just an XYZ position. These annotations act also as bulletinboards, where users can discuss, or evaluate the services. The application runs on many different devices including mobile phones (Symbian S60v2 and S60v3, such as Nokia 6630 and N93, respectively), PDA's and personal computers (Linux, Windows, MacOS X, unices).
More information on the official site of the project found at http://www.init.hut.fi/research&projects/m-loma/, well worth checking out for a number of reasons; a) this is an approach that focuses greatly on rendering locally the 3D urban models without the need of a remote database b) it manages, using OpenGL ES, to display large scale models, fully-textured, not on PDAs but on simple cellphones with even more limited processing power! c) the VR engine used is extremely user-friendly but more importantly very efficient when it comes to FPS framerates. Also worth taking a look at are the publications that have come out of this project, found at http://www.init.hut.fi/research&projects/m-loma/publications.html.
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