Application of Augmented Reality to Evaluate Invisible Height for Landscape Preservation

Abstract

Landscape is the visible cognition of human environment, including natural objects such as mountains, rivers, the sea, forests and artificial objects such as buildings, bridges, and other structures. Landscape can be recognized and evaluated differently, depending on the viewer. However, people who share the same or similar local culture or aesthetics have the common recognition and evaluation of the landscape. A landscape can give a strong impact and make a socially, aesthetically, environmentally, or religiously desired outcome. On the other hand, if a mismatched object is laid out in the faborable landscape, people may feel that the good landscape is being destroyed. Recently, many good landscapes from viewpoint fields have been destroyed by constructing high rise buildings on the background area of the aesthetically pleasing structure. Figure 1 shows examples which singular landscapes of a Japanese historical Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple are impaired by a modern tall glassy building and a tall broadcasting tower behind, respectively.In order to prevent such landscape destruction, regulation of height of buildings and other structures must be enforced not only in the vicinity but also in considerably wide background area of the interested structure. To properly set the height regulation, it is necessary to compute the maximum height that does not disturb the landscape from the viewpoint fields for all the locations in the landscape preservation area. Such maximum height is called invisible height (Higuchi, 1988) and can be measured by drawing a vertical cross section as shown in Figure 2. However, it takes much cost and time to measure invisible height for all locations if we perform manually using a map or make a 3D computer graphics (CG) urban model, as described in the next section....