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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: Visualisation and Simulation |
| Date: |
02/13/2002 07:37:18 AM |
| From: |
Bill MacKrell |
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Group,
I think Barry is right in that the perception of real-time (interactive)
3D-GIS technology is that it=92s too expensive and complex. I=92m sure
that=92s no longer the case either but there is a pretty steep learning
curve for individuals from the GIS community to tackle on their own.
Our company, ITspatial, was founded two years ago by individuals from
the military training & simulation community who have been developing
real-time 3D visualizations, 3D synthetic environments and simulations
for years. Our goal was to take this technology into new commercial
markets like Regional & Urban Planning, municipal infrastructure support
and the Transportation industry. We=92ve found success in delivering
useful end-user application into these communities and not so much by
trying to deliver the raw tools that we use or that were available.
Numerous tool vendors have tried to introduce their products into this
community only to realize after much effort that it doesn=92t work the
same as the traditional DOD market. You don=92t just dump off a bunch of
complex visualization tools and hit the road.=20
Also due to events following 9/11 we are finding much interest in the
3D-GIS technology we have developed and our commercial planning tools
from our old customers in the Defense & Intelligence agencies. It seems
they are now seeing a need to visualize high-resolution urban areas and
deal with underlying scenarios for Security planning purposes.
Traditionally flight simulations were produced from national source data
like DTED & DFAD and we never used GIS as a source. Now everything we
do ends up running through a GIS. Many of our municipal accounts are
also being redirected to focus on disaster preparedness and security
planning.
Its absolutely true that the cost of hardware a rapidly becoming a
non-issue. Just two years ago we would have had to be running on
high-end SGI onyx-level workstations (super computer) to be able to
render, in real-time, the geo-specific databases that we are currently
able to deploy on a $1,000-$3,000 commercial PCs with gaming-level
graphics card. Graphics Chip producers Nvidia and ATI have scarfed up
most of the engineers that worked at companies like SGI on the high-end
graphics subsystems and now a few years later we are seeing similar
technology in $300 graphics cards. For instance, Nvidia just announce
their GeForce4 family of graphics cards last week with 128MB of texture
memory on board and the ability to push millions of polygons (graphics
primitives) per second. You have to remember that the gaming industry
is now driving the graphics market not the DOD and simulation community.
Complexity of existing software is still an issue although we are seeing
software vendors addressing the usability side of things. Companies
like MultiGen with industry standard hi-end real-time production tools
introduced SiteBuilder3D as a low-cost, easy-to-use plug-in to ArcView.
This product uses some of the same technology that exists in the much
more expensive Creator family but at a fraction of the price and it=92s a
heck of a lot easier to use. The other trend is to create tools that
are adaptable to these new markets. We work really closely with a
company called TerraSim that sells a 3D database system tool called
TerraTools that allows us to package up an urban database production
process that we can deploy into our customers organizations. By having
the ability to script the process flow, our customers do not initially
need to know how the guts of TerraTools work, they simply need to know
where to place their GIS data and what attributes we require, and then
the database generation portion of the task becomes a button push. This
is a critical step in building 3D-GIS since the data changes so often
you wouldn=92t want to develop a strategy around hand modeling from your
GIS only to have to start all over when it changes next month or next
week. You have to think about automated database production to make 3D
visualization a feasible part of GIS.=20
Viewing software is also coming along quite nicely. ESRI just
introduced their first interactive flythrough product called ArcScene
with a nifty little motion model called the =93bird=94 which looks quite
easy to use. Based on our experiences in the military, we developed our
own 3D-GIS viewer called VIO that is based on a commercial scene graph
so you have all the traditional function of a high-end real-time scene
system but it also isolates the end-user from having to know much about
flight simulation in general. I=92ve noticed most of our customers are
not video gamers and don=92t know =93how to fly=94 thru a scene. VIO lets y=
ou
walk, drive or fly through the 3D environment that was created from your
GIS and the motion model was developed from requirements back from our
customers who are planners and GIS users. We have an additional
capability that a lot of the traditional real-time
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