Economic reconstructions of populated environments: Progress with the CHARISMATIC project

The Charismatic project is targeted at allowing interactive edutainment experiences to be produces economically to establish a dynamic new market sector for tourism and education. Charismatic is a Fifth Framework Project and includes technology companies, universities and test sites amongst the partners. The major technical work is to produce tools to allow definition of virtual environments representing reconstructions of large geographic areas (eg historic cities), to be coupled with definition and production of virtual humans to populate these environments. The combination, entertainingly scripted then requires improvements in real time rendering to allow experiences to be put on using low cost equipment infrastructure. This paper outlines the current state of the art in virtual heritage and describes the goals, planning and progress with the project which began in February 2000 and is scheduled to complete in 2002.