Culture cross road: a virtual town built from distributed route panoramas

This paper introduces an effort to build a cyber town from geographically separated routes. It brings streets distributed in different cities and countries together for people to traverse the space, learn history, understand living style, etc. The town is constructed by using our developed technology - route panorama and data acquired at several places. We design a flexible and comprehensive indexing scheme for connecting routes at crossings, and linking Web contents from routes. User can wander around from one route to another, and enter buildings to visit museums and sites with specific topics. This design gives a unique style for virtual exhibition of real scenes and provides cross-culture environment for visit on the Internet.