Applied Imagery

Description

The story of Applied Imagery begins at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab (APL). For some time, APL has worked with its research sponsors to develop a variety of 3-D visualization software tools. The impetus behind APL's development of the QT Viewer was the emergence of high-resolution interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (IFSAR) and LiDAR systems as well as the lack of affordable powerful visualization software. APL wanted to perform real time simulations, but the previously available software had significant limitations. The 3-D data was either converted to 2-D products that could be employed by conventional GIS workstation software, small subsets of the data were selected for visualization, or large and expensive graphics workstations were required. Because of the large-model problem in computer graphics, high-resolution 3-D data had to be substantially thinned out to remove the geometry processing bottleneck for virtual-reality simulations. To recover complexity in the scenes, texture maps were manually inserted over the geometry. The process of transforming data took so much manual effort and time that it constituted a large portion of the total simulation cost. Faced with these challenges, APL chose to exploit two technology developments. The first was the emergence of cost-effective and very high power 3-D chips and boards. This emergence was driven largely by the demands of the 3-D video game market...

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