Experience the Swiss mountain village of Soglio virtually

Photogrammetry can be used to create lifelike digital copies of real places. Walking through these duplicates in VR is a fascinating experience. This also applies to the most recent example: the completely digitalised Swiss mountain village of Soglio in the canton of Graubünden.

Airing out your head in the mountains for a short time in lockdown or shotdown? Virtual reality makes it possible once again.

The copy was created by a photogrammetry artist with the Twitter pseudonym Nobelchoco. More than 10,000 photographs taken with the help of a drone and DSLR camera served as the data basis.

The Slovakian photogrammetry solution RealityCapture stitched the images into a continuous 3D model. The result is 400 megabytes in size and is available in the free Social VR app VRChat  (an exciting platform, by the way, even if you don't have VR glasses yet), with or without VR glasses.

A virtual trip to the mountains

The model was the Swiss mountain village of Soglio in the canton of Graubünden, close to the border with Italy. Unlike other photogrammetry projects, the special thing about the digital duplicate is not the level of detail: the digital Soglio looks unfinished, like a painting that is missing many brushstrokes.

The impressive thing is the sheer scale of the 3D copy: the village has been almost completely digitised so that you can walk down every street and alleyway and get a very good idea of Soglio. Even the surrounding mountain landscape has been captured in rudimentary form.

Photogrammetry also saves memories for posterity

Virtual travelling is one of the most fascinating fields of application for virtual reality, especially in times when people are hardly allowed to fly and during the pandemic. Thanks to photogrammetry, real places can be captured true to the original and saved for posterity in their current state.

The process is quite time-consuming, but thanks to technological advances such as smartphone-based 3D scanning and videogrammetry, it could one day become more suitable for everyday use, which in turn could lead to a broad digitalisation of the world.

For a brief insight into the project and the narrow streets of Soglio, watch the video on Facebook or Twitter.

Source: Mixed