Interactive 3D terrain exploration and visualization.

ABSTRACTThe CECA VisLab is currently investigating the educational uses of a GeoWall 3D Stereo Rendering system. Many commercial and non-commercial programs are currently available for geographic virtual reality. We have explored the uses of one of these programs, Walkabout (under development by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago), a program that allows the user to move in relationship to the data in X-Y-Z directions to explore the terrain. We discuss several enhancements for this 3D stereo terrain visualization tool: the ability to directly load Digital Elevation Model (DEM) files and the implementation of a Level of Detail Algorithm (LOD) that optimizes the data in order to increase rendering performance. We discuss the performance of the enhanced program with a data set of particular interest to us, the Tennessee River Gorge including nearby mountains and the Chattanooga, Tennessee metropolitan area.