Talking digital cities: Connecting heterogeneous digital cities via the universal mobile interface

Digital Cities have been developed all over the world to provide regional city information. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate existing digital city systems via a universal mobile interface. The universal mobile interface integrates various media representations in connected digital city systems representing the same real city with audio semantic annotations. It is also applicable for a mobile use without developing a specific mobile interface. The demo system that connects three heterogeneous digital cities, namely, a 3D modeled virtual space, image-based virtual space, and map-based information space, successfully showed the connectivity of the universal interface. The current system provides the following functions: 1) a single and simple interface to navigate users into multiple digital cities, 2) a simultaneous walk-though into the connected digital cities, 3) audio descriptions of scenes using semantic annotation of objects in the connected digital cities, 4) prioritizing semantic annotation according to users' needs.