Aug 08, 2006
At the Carto BOF at SIGGRAPH 06, the Web3D Consortium announced it was establishing an X3D Earth Working Group. This group will build a distributed backdrop X3D model of planet Earth using publicly available terrain datasets, publicly available imagery and cartography, the X3D Geospatial Component and related open standards. An invitation-only workshop will be held at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) this fall to determine X3D Earth usage requirements, current capabilities, and necessary next steps for the working group.
Also at the Carto BOF:
Chris Thorne presented his recent work on approaches to error minimization for hi-fidelity scalable geospatial simulation and visualization. Significant improvements in rendering accuracy appear to be possible when floating-point roundoff errors are avoided by moving georeferenced scenes into viewpoint space (rather than object space). Upcoming work will adapt and test these approaches using Xj3D.
Alan Hudson demonstrated enhanced geospatial support in the open-source Java-based Xj3D with new X3D models for Pearl Harbor Hawaii harbor defenses and terrestrial parking orbits for satellites. These demos showed effective geospatial referencing with large models, lots of textures, effective user interaction and even networked agent-based simulation entities.
