Designing an Inclusive Tactile Panoramic Relief of the City of Graz

In this paper, we report on the practical experience of designing a tactile representation of the view over a city and landscape from the elevated position of a hill, which was digitally created from a combination of various geographic data sources and photographs. The tactile relief is part of a permanent museum exhibition and is mounted on an outdoor balcony enabling all museum visitors to experience the breathtaking view. Unlike existing works, we intended to create a faithful tactile representation of the view, mimicking many aspects of how the human eye perceives the world. This includes correct panoramic projection, three-dimensional representation of all buildings with realistic surface textures, correct depth layering, and plausible foreshortening not only in image space but also in depth. As perceived by the human eye, near objects are not only larger, but also have a more pronounced depth. We describe the entire process, from design considerations, focus groups, data acquisition, a depth-aware projection mapping algorithm, texture generation, the inclusion of markers and a legend pointing out important buildings, production, mounting, and final evaluation.