Entries Tagged 'PD' ↓

I finally got my hands on a copy of the June 2007 issue of Canadian Architect. This issue features a number of articles by the Canadian Design Research Network, of which I am a Board Member. One of those articles is entitled The Changing Face of Practice which highlights the PWL software Poetic Dimensions (which is now merging into the new OrbisRT). Of specific note is the use of PD in an Immersive Media Lab environment, and for collaborative use.

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.

A nice breakthrough today with the core code finished to convert from PD (and Polytrim) to Google Earth (by way of the industry standard COLLADA format). Support for colours, textures, etc. working now.

A little more work to improve positioning and auto-translation of texture formats still needed but that is just the icing.