Ever wonder what it’s like to be a bird? A new terrain visualization system called TerraVision II allows you to “fly” over the surface of the earth-via your computer screen. Okay, it’s not exactly like being a bird. It might be better, in fact, since a bird can’t overlay road maps and infrared imagery or click on an interesting building to pull up its Web site.
Researchers at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., created TerraVision II, a specialized World Wide Web browser, to navigate through representations of actual terrain based on U.S. Geological Survey elevation maps, aerial images and other information. Potential applications of the system include military planning and combating natural disasters such as forest fires.
TerraVision is exciting stuff: A peek at the system’s predecessor in the spring of 1997 apparently inspired Vice President Al Gore’s speech “The Digital Earth,” in which he called on scientists to create a digital model of the earth to a resolution of 1 meter. Assigning one pixel to each square meter of the globe, however, would require memory in excess of 1015 bytes (1 petabyte, or 1 million gigabytes)-still outside the capabilities of today’s computers. Yvan Leclerc, senior computer scientist at SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center, explains that TerraVision II is an initial attempt to create the software and data repositories needed to create the digital earth.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
