Towards scalable user interfaces in 3D City Information systems

A 3D revolution has taken place during the last few years, and it is shifting towards hand-held devices. In this paper, we adapted our 3D City Info for mobile users and built a demonstration of future mobile services. Our main purpose was to study navigation and way finding in a three-dimensional city model that is connected in real-time to a map of the same area and to a database, which contains information from the same area. We have built a fully working mobile laptop version of the 3D City Info with an integrated GPS receiver for our field tests. The three-dimensional model appears to illustrate motion and change of location more clearly than two-dimensional map alone. In the future the possibility to scale, zoom and drag modules and components of the interfaces seems to be useful for different contexts of use.