History of the City of Prague in Virtual Reality

This pages present a virtual model of Prague goal of which is to show the city and its history by means of virtual reality. The long term goal of the Praha4D project is to build a virtual model of the city of Prague where users could move freely both on the ground (walk or ride in a vehicle) and in the air (like flying in a helicopter). But the most significant feature is the incorporation of time - on small scale (movement of vehicles and eventually of people too), on mezzo scale (weather changes, day and night, seasons of the year) and especially on large scale (historical development of urban settlement).

The full-featured application could not be presented here. For technical reason there are only screenshots available. And some low-resolution movies could be found in a special section.

The first, prototype phase of the project was finished in the year 2006. A new completely re-engineered version is prepared now using previously acquired experiences. This new version is based on accurate maps and ortophoto-maps digitalized from archives and publications.

A large phono-archive is build also to accompany the final model with real sounds of city, including sounds of vehicles, church bells and so on. There were hundreds of old phonogram records digitalized to provide sufficient pool for background music selection.

Screenshots

Screenshots are divided into themes.

Art Gallery

Some further possibilities of post-processing of images and some looks under the hood of virtual model making are presented in a special section named Art Gallery.

Videoteque

Following video examples are presented to further introduce capabilities of the application.

3D Models Exhibition

Models of landmark buildings, vehicles and some small objects are presented in the section Models Exhibition.

Look under the Hood

Look under the hood of the model creation and data preparation.

Quiz

A little quiz from history of Prague is prepared as a by-product (only in Czech).

Photogallery of Prague

Some photographs of real Prague (made apart from thousands of technical documentation photos needed to build the model) are presented here.

Credits and used resources

For more information: info {at} praha4d {dot} net