Virtual Terrain Community
Organizations, Conferences, Community and News Sites
-
OSGeo
- the Open Source Geospatial Foundation
- A foundation to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led
open source geospatial software projects, and other related endeavors.
-
Created
February 2006, it publishes a journal and holds a conference, FOSS4G
- FOSS4G 2006: Lausanne,
Switzerland
- FOSS4G 2007:
Victoria, BC
-
FOSS4G 2008:
Cape Town, South Africa
- SlashGeo

- News and discussion site, a Slashdot for GIS and Remote Sensing.
- It doesn't get much traffic, but the quality of the news is good.
- International Society for Digital Earth /
International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE)
- Although the US "digital earth" initiative of the 1990s lost momentum
around 2001 (see Government Projects)
it did lead to a series of interesting international conventions.
- As of 2007, there is now a single site for the organization, as
http://www.digitalearth-isde.org/
- Conferences:
- Journal:
- International Society on Virtual Systems
and MultiMedia (VSMM)
- An organization which "seeks to address concerns and issues with the
use of Virtual Reality technologies and provides a foundation for integrating
together the human, technological and strategic aspects of VR under the
umbrella of international exchange, cooperation and development".
- They hold an annual conference, e.g.
VSMM 2004,
VSMM 2005
- Of greatest interest is their
Virtual Heritage Network ("Organization
for the use of technology in Cultural Heritage") which focuses on archaeology
and technologies which overlap with terrain modeling as described on this
site.
- International Workshop on 3D Geoinformation
- The first conference (3DGeoInfo'06)
was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 7-8 August 2006
- There are many papers on 3D GIS, urban visualization and related
subjects. The
proceedings are available as 'Innovations in 3D Geoinformation Science'
(ISBN 3-540-36997-X). It is a massive hardcover book, 760 pages
with 438 illustrations. It can be purchased
from amazon.com or
from springer.de (€170).
- Next was 3Dgeoinfo07: Delft,
Netherlands, 12-14 December 2007
- Full title: 2nd International Workshop on 3D Geo-Information: Requirements,
Acquisition, Modelling, Analysis, Visualisation
- The next event after that will be in Hong Kong in 2008.
- Vis-Sim
-
The
Image Society
- a technical, non-profit, professional association whose purpose
is the technological advancement of real-time visual simulation, related
VR technologies, and their applications, primarily by means of an annual
conferences with papers
- deals with a lot of terrain-related companies and technologies,
mostly "Vis Sim", i.e. aerospace/military
- For many years, vis-sim.org was a great place vis-sim industry news
and gossip, but it shut down in June 2003. Numerous sites have sprung
up in its wake.
- modsim.org
- news portal for "the Visual Simulation & Modeling Industry", begun
December 2003
- Virtual Globes Directory
- A central depository for "virtual globe" related links. The term
seems to mean terrain visualization at the global level. They had
a blog, but it's offline as of 2007.
- It's not clear how it relates to another popular blog of the same name,
Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes.
- Geosimulation Homepage
- Geoplace.com
- a news portal primarily for GIS, but increasingly covering terrain visualization
subjects as well
- nextgen3dcity
- First International Workshop on Next Generation 3D City Models Bonn,
Germany | 21-22 June 2005. It covered many virtual terrain subjects,
see the papers in the
program.
- CUPUM (Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management)
- Bi-annual conference which published many papers overlapping the field
of virtual terrain
- 1997 (Bombay) 1999 (Venice), 2001 (Manoa/Honolulu), 2003 (Sendai),
2005 (UCL London)
- CUPUM seems to be little-known outside of a narrow band of people; those
in the visualization fields and even most of those in urban planning haven't
heard of it!
- WSCG - International Conferences in Central
Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision