Hyper-Elevation Modeling of Terrain, Topography, and Urban Environments

The objectives of the proposed effort for this SBIR is to develop abstract methods of defining mixed topographical features on rural and urban terrain and to develop optimized real-time rendering algorithms that allow dynamic interaction with the above complex features in a training simulation environment. Traditional approaches used to render complex objects depend heavily on the offline processing of abstract data in order to put it into a form that is acceptable to the chosen run-time system. There are fundamental disadvantages to this approach including loss of abstraction, increased I/O bandwidth requirements, reduced performance due to CPU-based algorithms, and an inability to efficiently and easily incorporate new data or modifications to existing data. While this approach was ideal in the context in which it was originally developed over 20 years ago, today it is being stretched to the limit of what is practical. This has resulted in the evolution of what was once a great improvement over previous approaches into what is now a typically very costly process for visualizing synthetic environments. The technology we will develop in Phase II will seek to address each of these shortcomings by employing an innovative approach to run-time dynamic database construction and rendering.