User:HannoverPlan/sandbox

Landscape visualisation or landscape visualisation is composed of the terms landscape and visualization. First, “landscape” refers to a part of the earth's surface which is described through pictorial and functional aspects. Landscape is not perceived equally but landscape perception is determined through individually subjective factors. Secondly, “visualization” is the act of forming an image from objects, data and phenomena with graphical aids.

History
Zube et al. (1987) provided an overview of historic to recent techniques of landscape visualization, ranging from ancient drawings to today's computer animations. They point out that visualizations are always models, i.e., representations of reality with varying degrees of realism.

In the 19th century, British landscape architect Humphrey Repton already included a simple form of interactivity in his "red books": the viewer can turn the page between status quo and the future state.

Computer-generated landscape visualization
Today, the term “landscape visualization” is commonly used for computer-generated representations of perspective landscape views (Sheppard and Salter 2004). As landscape visualizations refer to actual places, there is a strong argument that landscape visualizations in planning should always be based on geospatial data to ensure their validity (Appleton et al. 2002). With respect to their geospatial referencing, landscape visualizations are a specific type of geovisualization.

Landscape visualizations have to represent the visual qualities of a landscape on basis of the terrain in combination with a geotexture, i.e., a geospecific photo or geotypical ground textures. The key landscape elements, e.g., built objects, vegetation, water, animals, people (cf. Ervin 2001 for details on landscape elements in visualization) are represented as sprites (billboards) or detailed polygon models. In this thesis, the term “landscape model” refers to the underlying geodata, whereas “landscape visualization” refers to the visual representation of such a model.

Vegetation is particularly important for the visual representation of the landscape. Even the elaboration of individual plants may be necessary to communicate the visual character of a landscape. However, vegetation is the biggest challenge in creating landscape visualizations (Deussen 2003). In geovisualization, vegetation is generalized by types in order to be distinctive – following the key principles of cartography.

In summary, landscape visualizations are specific forms of geovisualization, which represent the visual landscape in perspective 3D views and with varying degrees of realism. The presentation of landscape visualizations can be static or dynamic, on different levels of interactivity and on im- mersive or non-immersive displays (Sheppard and Salter 2004; Bishop and Lange 2005).