3D visualization of data for tourism for the tourism agency of the Altopiano di Pine' e Valle di Cembra in the Italian Alps

Territorial marketing and promotion are essential to the economical wealth of areas heavily relying on tourism for their economy. Advertisement campaigns, including TV, magazines and posters are certainly one of the major causes of cost for most tourism boards’ budgets. However, their effectiveness is limited since their results are entirely based on the projected image that these short messages can convey to the prospected visitors. Moreover, their effect is not persistent in time since it is limited to the time the advertisement campaign is broadcasted. In the last year, however, the behavior of average prospected tourists has changed dramatically. The Web has revolutionized the way people choose their final destination and how they do their bookings. In fact, most people today, especially in the younger age range, use the Web as the prime source of information about their specific travel destination. The Web is also becoming extremely popular by people booking their travels.

The commercial success of on-line flight ticket sales and hotel booking entirely reflects this tendency. More recently, the major success enjoyed by Google Earth has been dramatically changing the users’ habits. In fact, a growing number of people use geobrowsers, such as Google Earth, Nasa WorldWind or Microsoft Virtual Earth, to virtually explore the area they want to visit. Geobrowsers are used by people to check the position of a hotel or a restaurant, to check if amenities are within reach or to check if they are in a pleasant environment. The project presented in this paper aimed at benefiting from such a shift in people’s habits by deploying a 3D interactive and information-rich environment specifically targeted to tourists to promote a specific area within the Italian Alps.

The system

The project has led to the development of 3D visualization system in real time based on WorldWind. This is an Open Source software developed by Nasa. The choice of this platform, if compared with other similar solutions such as Google Earth, has the key advantage of being open and therefore it makes it possible to manage the data to be streamed.

In fact the most important limit of Google Earth is the fact that all the data has to reside on Google’s servers. Therefore the information to be published must be sent to Google which then manages of the databases’ upgrade (at intervals of few weeks). This therefore has as a consequence the loss of control and of ownerships of the information with no warranty that the data will be publicly and freely available in the future. The choice of WorldWind, which is the most important competitor of Google Earth, allows both the use of a standard platform (therefore with a wide impact on the public) and the independency in terms of data management. The company/service provider can the set-up its own servers over which they can have total control both in terms of accessibility and data content.

The project has brought to the development of an add-on, freely available on the web which makes it possible to download hi-resolution images of the area of Pinè and Cembra (Italy) at different levels of detail according to the user’s distance.

The user can activate the add-on from an icon automatically installed in the toolbar. Further the add-on creates a number of layers within the Layer Manager, containing several categories of interest for the tourist willing to visit the alpine area of Altopiano di Piné and Valle di Cembra (Pinè highlands and Cembra Valley).

Such data structure, organized in layers, activates a number of hotspots over the terrain, each corresponding to a geo-referenced point of interest. Whenever the user moves the mouse over an hotspot the system renders key information regarding the point of interest. When the user clicks on the hotspot the system automatically starts up the default browser and it loads the corresponding web page containing a detailed description, images and other multimedia data.

The project has also led to the development of the web pages containing detailed information of each hot-spot as well as the configuration of the server application which provides the streaming of cartographic data at different levels of detail.

The project has been sponsored by:

APT Altopiano di Pinè - Valle di Cembra
in cooperation with Serin Srl - Trento

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