Entries Tagged 'CLR' ↓

An article by my long-time colleague Prof. John Danahy of the Centre for Landscape Research, University of Toronto related to work using digital design collaboration tools to help inform, educate, and engage in real collaborative debate around a future waterfront region of the Greater Toronto Area. The tools and imagery are generated using the original design collaboration software - Polytrim - that John and I (amongst several others key people - hi Shannon, hi Steve!) worked on in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Thanks to Steve’s great work and efforts the program still survives and runs today and is one of the most flexible interactive design collaboration tools out there.

A next-generation of these capabilities (and more of course) is under development as the OrbisRT project I’ve mentioned here several times. 

OrbisRT is a next-generation visualization/game engine. It is a new Parallel World Labs initiative and builds upon prior work in the Centre for Landscape Research (UofToronto), ICDVM (UofWaterloo), and Immersion Studios. OrbisRT is a fully Open Source application (under the Apache license, though some components are LGPL, etc.), based on OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph, and a number of custom tools/modules (including some very nice Shader/Normal Mapping capabilities for terrain).

It is still very early days for this new application but the image here is from a model being constructed for an upcoming workshop and includes data from GIS, a 10kx10k aerial photo texture set, and photogrammetrically corrected (well in progress) models created in SketchUp (a 170+MB dataset), running at over 60fps on a 1920×1200 resolution screen (2.8GHz Pentium D, Nvidia 7950GX2 card not running in SLI mode). Thanks go to the Waterloo team for continuing to model this excellent new dataset!

Network control will be coming in the next week to complete the wrapping of the core PD and NeoPD tools that were used before, then on to all the new Game/MMO features of the previous PwlMMO client based on Torque Game Engine.