A virtual city, a virtual reality system to display an urban scene, is one of the most promising tools for ITS applications, including car navigation aids, shopping guides, and city planning, to name a few. This paper overviews our effort to create virtual cities through a sequence of images obtained with vision/range sensors. Our virtual city consists not of only stationary buildings but also of running and parked vehicles, which reflect the current activities in the real city. The first part of this paper describes how to construct still building images from a sequence of images. Here, we focus on methods employing an omni image camera that acquires images containing rays of 360 degrees viewing directions. The second part describes a system to display vehicle movement in the virtual city based on the image sequence given with a monitoring TV camera at an intersection. It also describes a preliminary step toward displaying illegal parked vehicles from information collected by a probe car.

The environment surrounding automotive technology is undergoing a major transformation. In particular, as technological innovation advances in new areas called “CASE” such as Connected, Autonomous/Automated, Shared, and Electric, various research activities are underway. However, this is an approach from the standpoint of the automobile centered, and when considering the development of a new automobile society, it is necessary to consider from the standpoint of “human centered,” who are users, too. Therefore, this paper proposes the possibility of technological innovation in the area of “Another CASE” such as Comfortable, Accessible, Safety, and Enjoy/Exciting, and introduces the contents of some interesting researches.