Defense

Military operations are heavily influenced by terrain. Important considerations include:

• Selecting stealth patrol routes through dead ground (hidden ground from a point)
• Efficiently contour navigating hills and mountains
• Siting indirect weapons and grazing machine gun fire
• Placing effective observation posts
• Maintaining VHF radio signals
• Using ground cover during assault and withdrawal
• Making use of natural light and shadow

EarthDetails' leading edge terrain algorithm stores, queries, and 3D visualizes high resolution, planetary scale datasets. It is based on accurate mapping principals and can visualize imagery, vectors and sensory data (routes, obstacles, regions, assets, friendly and enemy locations, etc.), as well as buildings.

The following video demonstrates an EarthDetails fly-through in real time using a low end ATI Radeon 9200 video card and year 2004 desktop technology. The data covers a US county, with irregular LIDAR elevation at 4 ft spacing(average), 1 ft ortho imagery, and 300 thousand rooftops supplied as ESRI polygons with a uniform height. We recommend that you save the video (right click, Save Target As...) before playing it. Note the frame rate and detail.

Video Demo of Fly-Through

Typical terrain software either

• handle smaller areas up to several map sheets at a time, making wide area operations a challenge, or
• achieve continental size extents at the expense of degraded elevation resolutions. By overlaying high resolution imagery, they can frequently mask the lacking elevation detail. However, computer 3D analysis, such as identifying dead ground, does not benefit from the imagery and requires the best available elevation detail to be effective. The true test of a 3D engine is to produce detailed scenes even when the imagery is turned off.

In contrast, EarthDetails' unique algorithm was built to handle gigantic elevation datasets and can render scenes with guaranteed limits on error bounds. Click the picture below to see a scene from the Canadian public dataset rendered with a 2 pixel maximum error as far as the eye can see. Note the incredible detail on the horizon.

Aside from its high-performance visualization capability, the EarthDetails algorithm achieves phenomenal performance in line of sight and trajectory calculations. This is necessary for knowing which support weapons can strike which enemy locations, color coding all forward slopes to likely enemy locations red, tagging all dead ground and highlighting reverse-slope as green, and other terrain analysis that can visually aid soldiers at all levels in today's high stress battlefield.

Applications...,

Highlights:

EarthDetails renders over 300 thousand rooftops, irregular high density LIDAR elevation data, and high resolution imagery supplied by OSI Geospatial for an entire county in the NorthWest.
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EarthDetails brings 3D to a TomTom GO In-Car GPS.

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EarthDetails renders the US West Coast with Geological Survey data.

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