Government / Academic
Terrain Tools and Research Projects

• EarthSLOT - Science, Logistics, and Outreach Terrainbases
  • A collection of pointers to scientific visualizations on 3D terrain which are built on top of a variety of earth viewing software, including: Google Earth, Skyline TerraExplorer, WorldWind, and GeoFusion.  They refer to these visualization as "applications", although they are more generally datasets.
  • Their mission is "to advance earth science and earth science education through the use of on-line 3D terrain visualization and GIS tools."
  • Includes some interesting datasets in Alaska, the Arctic and Antarctic, with an emphasis on geologic features including hurricanes, earthquakes and glaciers worldwide.
• Terrain Visualization at the CRS4 Visual Computing Group
  • a large number of academic papers, projects and work related to terrain
  • their Virtual Planet project (V-Planet) aims at "developing tools that will enable real-time 3D exploration of large scale phototextured terrain datasets acquired with remote sensing."
  • see Terrain LOD Papers for some of their work
  • there is a main page for the French-led V-Planet project
    • uses the P-BDAM algorithm for paging, claims GIS Interoperability
    • a three-year project from 2001 to 2004, but still not available at of June 2005; reportedly, it might become available sometime in 2005 for €10,000 (!)
• CLRview
  • realtime 3D, for SGI, from the Centre for Landscape Research at the University of Toronto
  • reads many data sources including DXF, TIN, DEM, Lattices, and Arc/Info Coverages
  • special Arc/Info attributes are supported for automatic generation of 3D form from 2D mapping for building massing, forestry, volumetrics, and other point-source data.
• Digital Earth (www.digitalearth.gov)
  • The vision: "a virtual representation of our planet that enables a person to explore and interact with the vast amounts of natural and cultural information gathered about the Earth."
  • Was a project of an ad-hoc working group of US Government agencies in the late 90s
  • It's not clear what they were actually doing, but it was somehow connected to SRI and NASA
  • As of 2002, the effort appears to be largely defunct (or "in transition" as the site says) with energies shifted to something called GAI - Geospatial Applications & Interoperability.  As of 2007, the site is just gone.
• Digital Earth PC [site gone?]
  • a project at NASA Goddard, funded by their Learning Technologies Project
  • free, open-source earth viewer for large datasets, with streaming of data from WMS servers
  • written to be completely open and portable: C++, OSG, OpenGL
  • as of September 2004, it was still preliminary and not yet available for download
  • This is the modern version of a project NASA did around 1995-97 called 'Digital Earth Workbench' which was a viewer for data at a whole-earth level, which used Performer on high-end SGI machines, and required an extremely expensive stereographic projection system.
• dlgv32
  • an open-source tool from the USGS back in 1998-2000
  • a Windows application for simple, orthographic viewing of nearly all USGS products: DLG-O, DRG, DEM, DOQ, SDTS DLG, SDTS DEM, GTOPO30, etc.
  • there is now a greatly improved commercial version, Global Mapper, which is free for simple viewing uses, so it's preferable to dlgv32
• GENETICS
  • an NGA-funded research project being undertaken by the Naval Postgraduate School's MOVES Institute to use readily available source data to procedurally create vast detailed landscapes at runtime without the need for a terrain database or proprietary tools.
  • the source is not released, but some core elements are finding their way into the Delta3D engine
  • they are using DTED for elevation, NLCD for vegetation placement, Bionatics for plant models, SOARX for terrain surface, and OSG for scene graph
• Infinite Universe Engine - IUE
  • Infinite Universe Engine is an impressive GPL-licensed renderer of the entire solar system
  • by Jochen Winzen at the University of Karlsruhe, 2003
  • it does not yet have a website of its own, so i have created a page for it here on the VTP site
• LandView Terrain Viewer
  • A set of 3D software and map/image files from the U.S. EPA that let you fly over a representation of real areas in the United States, and in doing so, to view the location of EPA-regulated sites, as well as population statistics for any radius.
  • The viewer is free and Windows-only.
  • built on the ChunkLOD library (see LOD implementations) for support of very large datasets: each city model is around 125-300 MB in size.
  • Though the terrain viewer is still in beta, many areas already available (Boston, Baltimore, New York City, Reston VA, Seattle, St. Louis, Tulsa OK, Maine, Richmond VA)
• Lenné3D
  • A 3-year German project started May 2002 at ZALF, for research in computer graphics, landscape modeling and visualization.
  • The project developed a system for interactive 3D landscape visualization both from map view and from stroller’s view. The 3D visualization system is supposed to support the dialogue on community landscape planning and decision-making. As an interdisciplinary project, it focuses on visualization of vegetation and GIS data as well as interactive exploration and editing of spatial data.
  • Many of the resulting papers are published in Trends in Real-Time Landscape Visualization and Participation, Proceedings at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences 2005
  • The Lenné3D project was (2005) spun off as a commercial company, Lenné3D GmbH (see Commercial Software and Plant Software)
• NIMAMUSE
  • set of applications for viewing all sorts of NIMA data formats, including several obscure formats: ADRG, ADRI, ASRP, USRP, CAC, CADRG, CIB, CRP, DCW, DTED, DBDB5, DBDBV, SRG, UVMAP, VMAP, VPF, WVS, and more
  • source code available!  requires XVT to compile their GUI applications
  • hard to use, e.g. i was unable to get any NIMAMUSE application to read commonly available DTED Level 0 files
• OBVIO
  • academic research demo, based upon OpenGL & GLUT
  • self-contained, with St. Helens 1K sample terrain
  • uses a very nice-looking (unknown) LOD algorithm
• TopoVista
  • academic demo program, see LOD algorithms page for an evaluation
• Virtual Field Course (VFC)
  • a set of programs which "provide computer-based support for fieldwork and a visual environment for exploring spatially referenced information."
  • very Java-based and VRML-dependent
  • emphasis on use in academia, specifically in the UK
  • had some very interesting-sounding modules such as VRGIS and UrbanModeller
  • may be abandoned - last web update was in 1999
• World Wind
  • Project at NASA Ames, funded by their Learning Technologies Project
  • Free, open-source earth viewer for large datasets
  • Supports streaming of data via WMS from the JPL OnEarth LandSat server, streaming of elevation from the SRTM dataset, place names, and other informative/educational layers
  • Written entirely with Microsoft-specific technologies: C#, .NET, "Managed" Direct3D
  • Easy to download and run on Windows, easy to use, and very impressive performance!
  • There is a Wiki site, World Wind Central, with more information about the project, including a FAQ
  • A fork of the WorldWind code called Punt began in 2005, with more of an emphasis on multi-language support
  • A Java version of WorldWind was begun in 2006.  As of September 2007, its Java SDK is still a work in progress, but was made available to developers in May 2007, as an 'early access' release.
• Umeå University VRlab
  • projects at Umeå, Sweden: GIS/Landscape Visualization and Urban Design and City simulation
  • they're working a whole range of visualization, from high-elevation images draped on elevation, to 3D roads, vegetation and buildings
  • their in-house software is based on OSG

Research Sites and Papers

• University of Zurich Landscape Visualization Lab (VisLab)
  • very active in many aspects of terrain rendering research
  • areas of focus include:
    • Generation of Visualization Databases
    • 3D Vegetation Visualization
    • Interactive Realtime Terrain Visualization
    • Meteorological Elements in 3D Landscape Visualizations
    • Animation of a Mountain Glacier
  • the lab has its own suite of software, built on the VTP software and OSG!
• CMU Digital Mapping Lab
  • has done lots of great virtual terrain work, mostly on trying to extract cartographic features from remote sensing / aerial images
  • they call virtual terrain Spatial Databases and Construction of Virtual Worlds
  • some of their relevant papers:
  • "Progress in Automated Virtual Worlds Construction", D. M. McKeown, et al January 1996.
  • "Automating the Construction of Large Scale Virtual Worlds", Michael F. Polis, Stephen J. Gifford, and David M. McKeown, Jr., in: Proceedings of the ARPA Image Understanding Workshop
  • "Issues in Iterative TIN Generation to Support Large Scale Simulations", Michael F. Polis and David M. McKeown, Jr., in: AUTOCARTO 11: International Symposium on Computer Assisted Cartography, 1993
  • "Iterative TIN Generation from Digital Elevation Models", M. Polis and D. McKeown, in: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1992
  • "Building a Cartographic Infra-Structure: Simulation and Cartography', D. M. McKeown, Jr. and G. E. Lukes, in: Proceedings of the DARPA Image Understanding Workshop, 1992
  • "Integrating Multiple Data Representations For Spatial Databases", D. M. McKeown and R. C. T. Lai, in: AUTOCARTO 7: International Symposium on Computer Assisted Cartography, 1987
• Semantic Modeling and Extraction of Spatial Objects from Images and Maps
  • a joint research project of 10 research groups in Germany, funded by the German Science Foundation (DfG)
  • includes the VirtualGIS Project at the University of Vechta, Germany