Visualizing a real forest

The authors collaborated with computer scientists, psychologists, artists, and others to create a highly realistic, computer-generated walkthrough of an existing forest. Funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, this work supported current experiments at the University of Arizona´s Department of Psychology. Researchers hope to determine the level of realism needed in computer-generated visualizations or animations of natural scenes for humans to reach conclusions about the virtual environment similar to those they would have reached by experiencing the actual site. The plan is to compare subjects´ responses to actual, video taped, and photographed walkthroughs, and computer simulated walkthroughs