The plan is to push out a new VirtualGeography about once per month, towards the end of the month, which shouldn’t be too big a drain on your mailbox. If you know of anyone who might like to get VirtualGeography, let me know their e-mail address and I’ll forward them a copy, or feel free to forward this to them and ask them to subscribe. By the way, subscription and unsubscription details are at the bottom (click here).

So, g’day to all fans, followers, supporters, surveyors, purveyors, promoters, proponents, exponents, experts, converts, conceptualisers, advisers, advocates, sophisticates and enthusiasts requiring to visualise and simulate both urban and rural geographic information (GIS), cartography, photogrammetry, remote sensing, digital elevation modelling (DEM) and general mapping.

By the spelling of "Visualisation" you may have already guessed that we’re not US based – that’s a good thing, or at least not a bad thing. 

Also, the link between visualisation and mapping may seem a little esoteric if this is your first encounter with this sort of stuff, but let me tell you, the link is significant… but enough of that: on with the show… I hope you like it. Any feedback you might have is highly appreciated. E-mail me hereto make your comments.

Graeme Brooke
VizMAP Pty Ltd

While many communities throughout the world have captured their infrastructure in GIS databases, they are faced with yet another challenge: visualizing the complex 3D urban environment–with its myriad structures and interconnections–out of 2D data layers that uniformly represent objects in the form of abstract colored points or lines. Experts learn to "reconstruct the world" mentally, but this reconstruction is not easily communicated to decision makers.

One solution is to depict the city in three dimensions from its GIS representation. However, important visual and geometric information is necessarily discarded in collecting this GIS data. To construct a realistic representation of the city we must reverse the abstraction process that first produced the GIS, fully leveraging GIS information while reconstructing the 3D world in a principled manner. In this way we can produce a visualization that is faithful to reality and representative of the physical world as we navigate through it.

A varied user community that is made up of city planners, commercial developers, emergency first-responders, utility companies, and A&E firms requires increasing levels of support for interactive presentations and analyses of the urban environment. For the past several years, TerraSim Inc. has been working on applications of its TerraTools® system to provide that support. This article discusses some of the considerations involved in constructing a 3D world.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (July 17, 2002)-Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI) announced today new advances that will soon enable technical and creative professionals to access supercomputer visuals from almost any mobile or consumer device over standard computer networks. This capability is a significant step in making SGI’s vision of universal access to advanced visualization a reality. SGI has been well known for transforming complex data into visualized information to create breakthroughs in defense technology, medicine, oil and gas exploration, engineering design and visual effects for the movies. 

In January 2002, SGI demonstrated the capability to enable customers to collaborate using real-time visualization, with common PCs, Linux® operating system-based tablets or any standard UNIX® OS-based workstation. The SGI solution-called Visual Area Networking-allows users to see graphics on their screens generated by an SGI® supercomputer at thousands of times the detail and complexity that normally could be handled by PCs, with their limitations in graphics and data handling capability. 

Now, SGI and its partners are making it possible to access this advanced visualization technology on new computing devices, specifically wireless mobile devices, television set top boxes and even wearable computers such as "eye pieces." Visual Area Networking makes that information-often based on data sets far too large and complex for a PC to handle-available to users over standard networks. In science, Visual Area Networking can be used for collaboration between researchers in far-flung places around the world. In engineering, it can be used for collaborative decision-making; in medicine this technology can enable doctors to have access to real-time 3D patient data, even if they are thousands of miles from the patient. Visual Area Networking could conceivably also be used in the entertainment industry to enable directors and editors to have access to supercomputer-quality visual effects, even when working in a remote location. 

"SGI is radically changing the way the world uses computer graphics," said Bob Bishop, chairman and chief executive officer of SGI. "In January of this year we introduced the breakthrough concept of Visual Area Networking that is revolutionizing the way our customers work. Now, a mere six months later, we’re extending the technology even further to a variety of mobile and wireless devices to enable our technical and creative customers with anytime and anywhere access to advanced visualization capabilities."

TerraTools 1.5 adds new and exciting capabilities in a number of areas including ease of use, data import, a continued focus on urban geospatial visualization, and additional support for port and harbor visualization. The most significant additions within TerraTools 1.5 include: 

Increased functionality.

Significant new functionality includes extensive support for advanced building extrusion with multiple appearance textures, allowing for user specification of foundation, storefront, topfloor, and roof railing textures for enhanced realism even with geotypical source data. 

TerraTools 1.5 incorporates modern graph analysis layout heuristics to give users cleaner and easier-to-read layouts of TerraTools project flowgraphs.

In keeping with our "Just enough GIS", our cartographic data editors provide for a logging facility to maintain a record of user modifications to source data. 

Powerlink owns, plans, develops and operates the Queensland transmission network. It is one of the world’s longest transmission grids, extending more than 1700 km, from north of Cairns in Far North Queensland to the New South Wales border. This ‘long thin’ network operates over a variety of terrains, linking distributors and customers with major power stations via a series of substations.

VizMAP has just completed a series of four projects with Powerlink to provide interactive, 3D visualisations of proposed transmission lines in order to be able to demonstrate to the general public what the proposed transmission lines will look like from any vantage point in the vicinity.

Sample still images from the four completed dynamic visualisations are displayed here. An active internet connection is required to be able to view these scenes.
 

Click on these small resampled images to view the full screen images from the web. Bear in mind that these are just screen dumps of a dynamic, interactive, 3D "flythrough". 

If you have a need to dynamically visualise your geographic data, let VizMAP knowyour requirements…

So they took their movies to raves and nightclubs, and in so doing, they’ve not only become leading practitioners of the new art of video-scratching, they’re finally being invited to perform at festivals and art galleries.

• The GeoCommunity Year 2002 Events  
• The GISCafe Upcoming Events 
• The GIS User Calendar of Events 
• The Geoinformatics Calendar  
• The ISPRS Events Calendar