174
Instruments of raster processing (photo-editing software) are
used in order to realise local matching between texture-mapped
surfaces and the ones reconstructed through synthetic materials,
because of hidden or missing elements.
Software for semi-automatic conversion from raster to vector is
spreading as an additional module of scanning packages and/or
hybrid Cad environments.
Data processing requested for realistic and interactive
visualisation always demands the availability of hardware
platforms with good resources and performances, such as the
latest generation of Pentium II.
2. THE DOCUMENTATION INSIDE INTERNET -
INTRANET WEBS
With no doubt, Internet technology has a deep impact on
today's activities. Internet network supplies a series of various
functions, among which the World Wide Web is the more
recent and spreading service, not only reference place in
organisations around the world, but also strategic tool for
marketing and cultural promotion.
It provides a set of interactive documents (pages) and the
possibility to manage them; the WWW is based on these
"pages" which include a combination of texts, images, audio
modules, animations and "links". In order to explore the web
sites, it is sufficient to go from one page to another by simply
clicking the mouse on the links contained inside texts or
graphics.
The documents are written in HTML language (files *.htm), the
standard for hypertextual document (texts or images which
include associative links to other information).
3D scenes, realised in VRML graphical language (Tittel et al„
1997) (files *.wrl, i.e. world), can be included to describe
interactive simulations of "virtual worlds" connected in the
WWW resources through a visualisation interface, i.e. a
browser. Technical specifications of language VRML were
written in 1994 from G. Bell (Silicon Graphics), A. Parisi
(Interview software) and M. Pesce (co-ordinator of the group);
the current version is said 97.
A web site corresponds to an Internet address and it is the place
dedicated to an argument or to a specific data transmission
function. It has a home page, the page of highest level that has a
primary role for each site presentation, because it is
automatically shown when the user approaches the WWW.
The WWW is based on a client-server architecture that consists
of computers receiving information from a local "provider".
Graphical information particularly allows 2D or 3D interactive
explorations and the connection to other documents of an
archive.
Representation of objects is managed through "interactive
images", in addition to the "static" ones. They are bitmap (GIF
8 bit format, with 256 colours, or 24 bit compressed JPEG, with
beyond 16 million colours) with selectable zones, called
"sensitive areas or points", to which hypertextual links can be
assigned.
These areas (named also hot spots) are associated to interesting
elements of the object and the browser points them out
whenever the mouse cursor gets a different shape (namely a
hand).
This way, it is produced a "sensitive" 2D document, in relation
to the employment of an orthogonalised image (files GIF or
JPG), or a "sensitive" spatial visualisation, according to the
creation of 3D scenes in VRML format.
Zoom Rotate Pan
Fig. 1 - Main controls on the Cosmo Player dashboard.
