V4Design
Today, vast troves of visual and textual data, which are of great interest to architects and video game designers, such as paintings, archival footage, documentaries, movies, reviews or catalogues, and various other forms of artwork, are currently difficult to access and cannot be easily incorporated in the design process. Such works of art can serve as sources of inspiration and design direction towards innovative designs, new concepts, or period-focused structures, among others.
V4Design aims to enable the re-use and re-purpose of such multimedia content by proposing an innovative solution for its effective integration, so as to extract 3D representations and VR game environments. This will allow architects, designers and video game creators to re-use heterogeneous archives of already available and retrieved digital content and re-purpose it by making the wealth of 3D, VR, aesthetic and textual information easily accessible and providing resources and tools to design and model outdoors and indoors environments of architecture and VR video game projects. The V4Design multimodal content will be chosen so as not to infringe on any copyright issues, to be open for re-use and re-purpose. It can be provided after informed consent by project partners with the role of content provider or public domain data can be gathered from the web, under the condition that it is non-identifying and subject to licenses that allow its re-use and even the exploitation of its outcomes, such as Creative Commons US Public Domain licensing.
To achieve this, V4Design will build upon the concept of semantic integration of heterogeneous 2-dimensional multimedia in order to generate enhanced dynamic 3-dimensional structures and environments. Towards this direction V4Design will collect data from the consortium partners (DW, EF, AF, SFp), and the web by crawl online art libraries and databases for freely available content (textual and visual). The collected content will mainly be used to create dynamic 3D-models of objects, buildings/structures and environments and to support 3D and VR environments. Architects and video game designers will thus be able to easily access and use a realistic and comprehensive representation of structures of interest from various time periods and styles in an economical and cost-effective manner. Innovative results that integrate past aesthetic trends, localization of buildings and art-elements in visual data, text generation and semantic knowledge will also be produced as complementary material to support the design process.
The tool will enable the efficient re-purposing and re-use of existing digital content, extending its lifespan and maximizing the return on investment for producers. The corresponding market (e.g. movie or documentary production) will expand into new domains, those of architecture and video game design. Their creative workflow will be enriched, as the V4Design content production and management will provide efficient access to a wealth of previously unused data, leveraging the capabilities offered by the SoA V4Design tool. The enhanced design, production and management process will be realized in an economical manner thanks to the technological innovations of V4Design, which will provide easy, efficient and rapid access to currently dispersed data of interest.