3D geo-informatics has entered the digital age, hesitantly in some areas, and rampantly in others. Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth are household names. Although limited to landscapes and buildings envelopes, their massive digital geographic libraries are today the playground of millions of people and the generator of new forms of content and applications with tremendous impact perspectives. However, these pale in comparison to those that will be made possible as soon as urban digital libraries will be fully available and exploitable.

Therefore, the V-City project aims to research, develop and validate an innovative system integrating the latest advances in Computer Vision, 3D Modelling and Virtual Reality for the rapid and cost-effective reconstruction, visualisation and exploitation of complete, large-scale and interactive urban environments. The focus of the project on urban environments is not only made possible by the latest technological advances, but also justified. Urban environments represent one of the most important and valuable cultural heritage as acknowledged by the UNESCO.

This system will enable historians, architects or archaeologists to reconstruct from existing data, study, understand, preserve or document urban environments using an innovative interactive 3D user interface. This project will progress beyond the current state of the art in the field of large-scale geospatial libraries built from multi-source and multi-format architectural and cultural information.

It will also be an answer to concrete needs for a wide range of users as demonstrated by the commitment and the diversity of the end-user organisations involved in the V-City User Group. These will contribute to both the definition of the system and its validation on real-scale scenarios.