Summer 1998I spent the summer of 1998 interning with the Perception group at the Artificial Intelligence Center, Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International in Menlo Park, CA. I spent most of the summer working on the second generation of TerraVision (TerraVision II). TerraVision II is an interactive terrain visualization system that enables real-time visualization of geo-referenced data including USGS-provided elevation data, aerial and satellite images with precision of up to 15cm, cultural features (roads, rivers, buildings etc.), and vehicles. TerraVision II can dynamically page multi-terrabyte datasets across variety of networks, including MAGIC -- a wide-area IP/ATM network with over 1 Gbps network throughput. My work consisted of designing and implementing a VRML-based cross-platform version of TerraVision that runs in a VRML browser. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is a file format for 3D-based multimedia and shared virtual environments on the Internet. I created a series of extensions to VRML to support TerraVision's hierarchical representation of terrains. The resulting VRML files are viewable with consumer-level VRML browsers, such as CosmoSoftware's (recently acquired by Platinum Technologies) CosmoPlayer. The TerraVision project will eventually provide a highly optimized VRML browser that will include additional features such as support for DPSS (The Distributed-Parallel Storage System), a scalable, high-performance, distributed-parallel data storage system designed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
I also created some VRML datasets by converting the original ones provided by USGS and other agencies. TerraVision II will ultimately provide high-resolution geo-referenced datasets of the entire Earth. While at SRI, I co-authored a paper with Viktor Miladinov and Dr. David Banks, both of Mississippi State University. The paper is titled Simulation and Visualization in a Browser and was recently published at the 1998 IEEE Visualization Workshop on Distributed Visualization Systems held in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our work on the VRML-based TerraVision resulted in a paper submitted to The Fourth International Conference on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language and Web 3D Technologies. The paper is titled Modeling the Digital Earth in VRML and is currently under review. During the summer I also worked on a research project with my advisor Dr. David Banks. The project titled "Amplification Widgets" was a continuation of previous work I had done in the spring semester. The result is a paper submitted to the 1999 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics. The last week at SRI I worked on porting TerraVision (over 60,000 lines of X/Motif/OpenGL code) to Windows NT. I used the NuTCracker environment (which I highly recommend) to successfully finish the port in 4 days! While at SRI, I worked with an awesome bunch, namely:
If you are interested in seeing some more snapshots of TerraVision in action, take a look at the gallery. |