For Immediate Release:
VizMAP Launched
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia - Thursday, 14 February 2001: A
new company has been formed to cater to the
burgeoning real-time interactive 3D Visualisation marketplace.
The company, VizMAP Pty Ltd, provides (amongst
other things) a bureau service to all sectors (private, public, academic
and defence) in the provision of real-time fly-throughs (Visualisations)
based on data provided to us by our client.
In the few weeks since it's inception, VizMAP has already created many
Visualisations for clients such as
the Queensland and New South Wales governments, a number of aerial survey
companies, a mining company, a hydrographic survey company and the
Australian Department of
Defence.
Applications
that these Visualisations have been used for range from
public display to land development planning, management meetings,
environmental impact strategy planning, mission rehearsal, GIS-based asset
management and flight training to name but a few.
VizMAP has also recently signed an agreement with SPOT
Imaging Services in Sydney to provide Visualisation databases to their
satellite imagery customers.
VizMAP Pty Ltd creates the
Visualisation databases, which are then handed back to the client.
Royalty-free, run-time visualisation
software (Audition) is provided so that they can run the interactive
fly-through on their own computers, or they can even distribute the entire
Visualisation and run-time software to their own customers.
All the images shown here are thumbnails of
screen dumps of Visualisations done by VizMAP. They have been captured during
full-screen interactive real-time
fly-throughs on bog-standard Pentium-class PC's running Audition. On a
reasonably configured PC it is possible to achieve full-screen frame rates
in the order of 30-60 Hertz, allowing for very believable Visualisations.
VizMAP creates the Visualisation databases from
any, or all, of the following components:
- Satellite imagery or orthorectified aerial
photography (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, GeoTIFF, etc)
- Digital elevation models (DTED, XYZ, ESRI
GridASCII, etc)
- Vector data - typically from a GIS (SHP,
etc)
- 3D models (MAX, FLT, etc)
- Textures (JPEG, GIF, RGB, etc)
These components are
intelligently combined to create a virtual environment
through which the user can interactively fly or drive.
There is no limit to the amount of data that
can go into a Visualisation - VizMAP recently created a 200x200 km
Visualisation of
Adelaide and it's surrounds for SGI. The eventual data base was a couple
of gigabytes but the database was
able to be interactively flown-through on a PC (by the way - if you do
have access to a high-end Unix 3-pipe graphics supercomputer such as an
SGI Onyx 2, VizMAP can 
tailor the output for that as well).
If you would like VizMAP to
create a stunning "virtual environment" for you, all you need to do is
supply VizMAP with your data. VizMAP may even be able to source data for you.
If you want to get a better feel for the
quality and size of the output databases, check
out the full-screen images
on the VizMAP website at http://www.vizmap.com.au. Follow the
link to "Visualisations".
Contact VizMAP for more information.
About VizMAP: VizMAP Pty Ltd, is a worldwide supplier of terrain
Visualisation and related services to the defence, GIS, environmental, mapping, mining and exploration industries, engineering and construction firms as well as government administration departments dealing with land, transportation and the environment. VizMAP's products are designed to be run on reasonably to highly configured graphics computers (PC, Linux and Unix) for public display, group training, mission rehearsal, environmental monitoring, etc. and to enhance management decision making. VizMAP maintains a number of offices in Australia with affiliation in Asia, Europe and the USA and provides support and services to customers worldwide. For more information about VizMAP visit the VizMAP Web site at
http://www.vizmap.com.au.
