Exploring Past and Present: VR Reconstruction of the Berlin Gendarmenmarkt

Virtual reality games demand the use of highly realistic 3D models to provide an immersive environment to the users. Therefor, modeling of real world structures is a common process within the industry. In recent years the photogrammetric tools have become available to aid in this process. However, obtaining high quality imagery is still an issue w.r.t. budget and time constraints. We present a simple, effective method for the reuse of existing video and photo material towards the generation of 3D models suitable for a virtual reality gaming environment. An abundance of existing content may be available in on-line repositories (YouTube, Flickr, Google images,..) and can be exploited. A complete video-to-VR pipeline is presented and a use-case of the Berlin Gendarmenmarkt square is tested, wherein the use of both commercial and open source software is evaluated. Our proposed method improves existing workflows used by VR game designers in both structural accuracy and creation time of real world objects.