The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B5. Beijing 2008 
The system now supports a number of new areas of geographic 
inquiries, and gives us rich and significant findings, with its 
comprehensive 3D visualization of historical contexts and 
varieties of useful information of Kyoto through time. 
3D city model generation system 
and MapCube™ 
2D Digital Map 
Aerial Image Data 
! irsAR Plata 
3D City Model Automatic Generation System! 
Photo-realistic 3D City Model 
(MapCube®) 
Figure 3. Distribution of machiyas by type 
hand their historical and cultural value to the future 
generations. 
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So-nikai 
Hi 4>~M Chu-mkai 
H =№BT Sanakaidate 
Mi ?a Hiraya 
! tt-aa Shimotaya 
gggt mn Meitsuki 
* **«* Kanban-date 
* ******* Other types of 
wooden house 
*i*g>«*aag(» i un I 
Figure 2. Automatic generation of 3D city model (MapCube®) 
Figure 4. Typical machiyas in Kyoto 
(left: So-nikai or full 2 story, right: Chu-nikai or lower 2 story) 
3. KYOTO AT PRESENT 
The authors first modeled the present-day Kyoto before 
reconstructing the past Kyoto. Kyoto was exempt from air raids 
in the war, and thereby retained numerous pre-war buildings, 
such as machiyas, temples, shrines and western style buildings. 
Machiyas, or traditional townhouses, in particular are of 
special importance to the reconstruction of Kyoto because most 
urban areas of Kyoto consisted of machiyas in the pre-modem 
period (Figure 3). 
The landscape of Kyoto characteristically consists of natural 
elements such as the mountains surrounding the city and the 
rivers, as well as the built elements including machiya, temple, 
shrine and modem heritage building. Therefore, the research 
firstly aimed at the construction of 2D-GIS of those elements 
and then the 3D-GIS were built based on them. 
3.1 Machiya 
Machiyas (Figure 4), traditional townhouses of Kyoto, most of 
which had been built in between the 18th century and World 
War II, have been decreasing rapidly in recent decades. Today, 
it is a very important issue how to evaluate machiya and to 
However, they still are dominant elements of the urban 
landscape of Kyoto, and there are approximately 22,000 units 
today. Considering that there still are many machiyas in Kyoto, 
a computer program for automatic generation of machiya 3D 
models has been developed as a macro package of Microsoft 
Excel. “Machiya VR Generation Macro” retrieves the 
coordinates and attribute data of machiyas from GIS database, 
applies one of machiya library models for each lot, resizes the 
model matching to the width and depth of the building lot, and 
places the model in the VR space (Figure 5). 
Full 2 slon 
Texture mapping 
ade element* 
\ ur< 
Digital photo image —orthogonal image 
Ixm er 2 store 
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