Setting up Virtual Geographic Environments in Unity

Abstract

We propose a setup for presenting complex heterogenous environmental data in a Virtual Reality environment. After a number of pre-processing steps required to integrate various data sets in a unified context, our workflow uses the Unity engine in combination with MiddleVR to create interactive applications for Virtual Reality environments to support research and evaluation for case studies containing domain-specific data from environmental monitoring and modelling. Typical challenges are described when handling such data in a graphics environment and solutions are proposed where possible. We give an overview of project structure and functionality added to Unity for visualisation of and interaction with the data and present an example application.