Digitizing the Wooden Scale Model of a Twentieth Century Urban Utopia for the Development of a Full-Scale Virtual Tour Application Using a Game Engine

Abstract. We created a virtual tour application using photogrammetry, GIS data, and a game engine to allow a greater audience to discover in an immersive way the wooden scale model (scale 1:1000) of a Utopian version of the city of Rimouski imagined by the architect Luc Laporte. In this paper, we show how we determined, based on the quality requirements for video game assets (texel density), what are the conditions to be met during photogrammetry survey (GSD) of such a scale model intended to a virtual tour application. We explain how creating a 3D version of Laporte’s wooden model is a problem very similar to air-based photogrammetry of urban spaces but, contrary to typical aerial photogrammetry where the distance d is much greater than the focal length f, we are strongly limited by the depth of field as, for the scale model, the distance is only somewhat greater than the focal length, yielding a reduced depth of field.