Virtual Reality (VR) applied to environment representations: some examples at the University of Padua.

Lately, in the field of the architectural survey, there is the need to have a more and more complete representation of the scene or of the surveying object. Particular efforts are made to integrate the photogrammetry survey with representations of virtual visits. One of the more appreciated commercial systems that allows to visit environments interactively, i.e. their inside and their objects, providing high quality images regardless of the complexity of the scene, is the " Quick Time VR". In this paper we present in detail the application of that interactive system to the virtual visit of the "Anatomical Theatre" and of the "Ancient Courtyard" at the University of Padova, providing also the theoretical basis of the algorithms employed for the reconstruction of the visited environments from a set of digital images.