Virtual Terrain Project (original) (raw)

the Virtual Terrain Project (2001-2013)

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The dream of VTP was to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form.

This goal would require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing. VTP gathered information and tracked progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and realtime rendering algorithms. VTP wrote and supported a set of software tools, including an interactive runtime environment (VTP Enviro). The tools and their source code arefreely shared to help accelerate the adoption and development of the necessary technologies.

During its active years, the project helped hundreds of companies and thousands of students to implement realtime 3D terrain in their products, research and education.

You can still download the full VTP 3D software, or if you only need geoprocessing,download the VTBuilder tool. Most of the subject pages below are outdated, but may still be useful collections of educational info.

Latest:	2015.10.18	added the book Digital Representations of the Real World to Media
	2015.10.17	added Potree to Noncommercial
	2015.10.16	add Environment Agency LIDAR toUK
	2015.09.27	add Tinman 3D SDK and update GeoFlyer 3D Maps on Commercial added Procedural City Generation in Python to Procedural Buildings
	older news...

About Virtual Terrain
Uses and Hype
Tourism, Planning
Small Terrain Areas / DTM
Long-term Goals of the VTP
Community, Media
Data Openness

Elevation
Overview / DEM,DTED
Global Datasets:SRTM
Bathymetry,Artificial Terrain
Caves, Contour Data
BT Repository

Ground Detail
Imagery:
Formats,Satellite,Aerial,
Collecting Your Own Aerials / UAVs
Whole-Earth,Free Sources,
Commercial Sources,
Processing Multi-band Images
Geotypical, Ground Cover
Large Textures in Hardware
How to Apply Textures
Spherical Textures
Detail / Blending

Rendering
Level of Detail (LOD):
Papers,Implementations
Spherical Grids,Paging
TINs: precomputed,runtime
Light & Shadows,Dynamic Range
Sky / Atmosphere, Clouds, Water,
Fog, Rain, and Lighting
Performance, Navigation
Draping

Data Sources and Formats
Coordinate Systems /UTM
Point Clouds, LIDAR
Vector Data (DLG, TIGER, VMAP..)
Topographical Maps (DRG..)
OpenStreetMap
Water Data
Getting USGS Data,SDTS
Network Protocols:WMS, WFS
Data Collection (GPS, Surveying)
Integrating Multiple Data Sources
Representing Unknown Values
Global Data Sharing/Referencing
Cell Registration
Distance

Culture
Roads / Rail and Fences / Power
Buildings and Cities:
Procedural Buildings /Roofs
Research and Projects
Commercial Services
Commercial Building Data
Culture Classification
Vehicles and Traffic
Geocoding
Flight-Sims

Plants
Overview
Research, Books and Papers
Software Tools /Xfrog
Distribution on Terrain / Land Cover
Geometric Modeling
Creating Plant Texture Maps
Plant Images and Databases
Forestry

The VTP Software
Implementation and Development
Vegetation, Plant Library
Libraries: vtlib, vtdata
File Formats: BT,VTST,VF,Loc/VTAP,ITF
Documentation, Screenshots
Applications:
Enviro,VTBuilder,CManager
Internationalization

Other Terrain Software
Commercial
Noncommercial
Government / Academic
Artificial / Artistic
Location-specific
GIS, CAD,3D Modeling
Games, Defense,Simulation
Virtual Tourism
Software Utilizing the VTP
Earth Viewers chart

Modeled Areas
Global Overview
United States:California, Hawai‘i,Nevada,New York,Washington
International:Africa,Asia, Australia,Costa Rica, China,Canada, Europe,France, Germany,Greece, Italy,Japan, Middle East, Netherlands,New Zealand,North America, Central America,Romania, South Africa,South America,Spain, Switzerland,UK
Beyond Earth