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VR-TheWorld 4.4 | The physical world within MAK ONE Synthetic Environments

30 Jul 2024

Many of the layers delivered with VR-TheWorld have been updated with newer and better data. VR-TheWorld comes with a complete Global basemap consisting of newly updated, seamless, and color-balanced 10m imagery from the Sentinel-2 Earth imaging satellite; 30m SRTM-based elevation and 500m bathymetry together defining the shape of planet Earth (above and below the ocean surface); and 100m landcover (land use) raster layer that can be used to stimulate procedural generation of vegetation in the MAK Earth Terrain Engine inside of all the MAK ONE applications.

High-Resolution Insets

VR-TheWorld comes with several high-resolution areas you can use as the simulation terrain in MAK ONE and any application supporting the streaming terrain standards (TMS, WMS, and WFS).

Features Abound

VR-TheWorld includes snapshots of Open Street Map features that provide sources for procedural placement of human-made objects such as buildings, roads, rivers, powerline.

Proxy to Remote Web Map Services

VR-TheWorld allows users, who are connected to the internet, to setup proxies to other online data sources. VR-TheWorld comes configured with proxies to the NOAA Seamless Chart Display Service and USGS Topo. These data sources are useful as map backgrounds in VR-Forces and 3D visualizations in VR-Vantage.

MAXAR Samples Included

VR-TheWorld includes several interesting datasets from MAXAR. Explore the high-resolution Schwyz, Switzerland area with 0.5m imagery & land cover, and for those experimenting with 3D tiles, we’ve included a sample of Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

The tool to manage your data

VR-TheWorld uses a browser-based GUI that allows users to better manage their terrain data and prepare it for use in simulation.

Updated User Interface

VR-TheWorld uses a browser-based GUI that allows users to better manage their terrain data and prepare it for use in simulation. Rendering layers onto a globe helps visually inspect your data and understand the coverage of each layer. Admin panels let you inspect and edit the metadata, properties, files, and tiles of each layer.

Improved Tiling Management

VR-TheWorld has a new, faster, spatial index for sorting files.
Tiling is super important for optimizing access to terrain data. When data is added the VR-TheWorld can tile so it’s optimized and ready for fastest access, or you can defer tiling until individual tiles are requested. Deferring saves disk space on the server. (And let’s be honest...some areas of the terrain will never be accessed in the lifetime of a simulation system. With VR-TheWorld, you have the choice of how to manage your tiling.)

Export of raster data for offline use

VR-TheWorld now has the ability to export raster data (such as elevation and imagery) to MBTiles format files for offline use. Through the VR-TheWorld User Interface, you can decide which individual layers you want to export data from, and for which specific geographic areas you want to export data from each layer.

Data Delivery and Support:

Delivered as a Docker Container

VR-TheWorld is a web server delivered as a Docker Container. You can run it in whichever container runtime environment best suits your needs: You can choose either the Docker runtime environment or the PodMan runtime environment - both of these environments will run on either Linux or Windows.

Supports All Your Datums and Projections

VR-TheWorld lets you supply geographic data in any projection or datum. Your applications can then request tiles in any other datum or projection and let VR-TheWorld worry about the transformation process.

Encrypt Data in Transit

Those wanting secure transport of terrain data can install an SSL Certificate and access VR-TheWorld through https.

Data Format Updates

We’ve implemented a new file processing framework in VR-TheWorld that allows you to run operations on files like reprojection, translation, and converting MSL elevation files to WGS84. We’ve also:

1. Added the ability to save elevation tiles in Mapbox Terrain RGB format in addition to TIFF and Cesium Quantized Mesh.
2. Added the ability to generate WebP tiles for Raster layers.
3. Added support for WMS 1.3, in addition to 1.0 and 1.1, and improved GUI for creating WMS layers.
4. Added the ability to export layers as MBTiles.

VR-TheWorld 4.4 | The physical world within MAK ONE Synthetic Environments

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