Performance Evaluation of Billboard-based Walking Animation in Cyber City Edo

Abstract

We have been developing a walk-thought environment for a restored historical city “Edo” based on 3D computer graphics techniques. Many walkers are needed to improve the reality of such a cyber restored city. However, many people walking around the city require heavy graphics computation power. For real time walk through, we adopt a billboard animation technique with trimmed texture images captured from video movies. We have measured and evaluated the rendering performance of the billboard animation technique depending on the number of the billboards and their resolution. Experimental results show that the billboard animation technique can generate walk-through images with a couple of hundreds persons walking in the cyber city “Edo” in real time.