The need for a critical eye is particularly apparent when considering the advances in realism, since opportunities for realistic visualisations are rarely matched by the availability of suitably detailed data, and viewers' perceptions of factors such as accuracy and certainty are also affected by the level of realism in an image.
Pictorial, and increasingly photo-realistic, visualisation of past landscapes is underpinned by reconstructions of the past environment themselves effected through palaeoecological methods.
This paper describes the development of a photo-realistic visualisation method which uses the combination of a geographic information system (GIS) with off-line augmented reality (AR) techniques.
In this paper, we augment a historical range of variability (HRV) assessment made from an aerial photograph time series with additional disturbance state representations created using photo-realistic visualisation.
We simulated tree decline and its consequences for landscape aesthetics and biodiversity, using photo-realistic visualisations based on photographs identified as significant by graziers, and empirically derived habitat relationships for a series of birds and bats.
In particular, realistic landscape visualisations may offer special advantages in rapidly advancing peoples' awareness of climate change and possibly affecting behaviour and policy, by bringing certain possible consequences of climate change home to people in a compelling manner.
Based on these results, we propose design suggestions for building realistic map-like visualisations.
Alternative forest management scenarios were presented using realistic 3D landscape visualisations.
The potential to combine micro-CT data, medical grade CT data and photographs to develop highly realistic virtual models for visualisation and 3D printing is also demonstrated.
