Multi-Platform Real-Time 3-D Visualization System for Urban Environments and 3-D Terrain Imagery

There is an explosion of 3-D graphics technology in the mainstream commercial market. A $10,000 3-D graphics PC outperforms a $100,000 UNIX 3-D graphics workstation in virtually all aspects, in particular the 3-D rendering speed. We have an opportunity to exploit this new technology so every analyst or war-fighter can use their desktop PC to visualize in real-time 3-D urban and terrain data. In the past, DoD users have relied on shared or limited access to real-time 3-D graphics computer systems. Our objective is to design, prototype, and demonstrate a distributed, 3-D virtual "white-board", where the background is unlimited imagery draped terrain and the markings are complex 3-D models that make up an urban scene. By using mainstream technology, the virtual white-board will be as easy to use as a conventional electronic white-board. There are two major technical objectives: 1) design a client/server architecture, where unlimited terrain and urban data, and behavioral information are distributed to clients for real-time 3-D visualization; and 2) rapidly prototype the designed system with two different PC based clients served by a single data server.