Terrain Agility for your Simulations– VR-inTerra

With VR-inTerra, you can quickly and easily supply your simulation application with the terrain information it needs. Using VR-inTerra’s terrain-independent C++ API, you can execute high-performance mission functions including height-of-terrain (HOT) checks, line-of-sight (LOS) tests, and feature queries regardless of which type of terrain you use. VR-inTerra supports all of the major terrain approaches: hand-modeled, tool-generated, direct-from-source, and Open Streaming Terrain.

• Terrain agility toolkit
• Line-of-sight (LOS)
• Height-of-terrain (HOT)
• Feature queries
• Optimized collision graph
• Terrain format independent
• User extensible

Terrain-Independent API

VR-inTerra can load, page, or stream terrain from a wide variety of formats or sources into a single, consistent run-time representation consisting of a collision graph and vector network. The highly optimized collision graph, based on the popular Bullet physics engine, supports thousands of intersection tests per simulation frame. The vector network, based on the run-time representation used in MÄK’s VR-Forces, provides a common interface to the feature data needed for terrain analysis – including navigation and route planning.

Your application needn’t be concerned with details of the terrain format or how the terrain was loaded. You can focus your development time improving your simulation qualities and leave the terrain to VR-inTerra.

Terrain Where It’s Needed

Simulations understand the terrain differently than visualization systems. 3D Visual scenes use perspective to show high detail in the foreground and lower levels of detail in the distance. Simulations, on the other hand, require “ground truth” everywhere. VR-inTerra reconciles this difference by letting your application load the ground truth where it is needed by the simulation: e.g. under each entity and between entities within sensor range. By managing the terrain requests, your simulation can take advantage of well-designed databases to manage the terrain paging throughput and memory consumption.

Future Proof Your Simulation

Through its terrain agile approach, VR-inTerra enables simulation applications to natively take advantage of new terrain approaches, like dynamic composition, direct-from-source, and open streaming terrain. Because of terrain agility, simulation applications are able to play in synthetic environments without requiring new loaders or terrain converters for each new terrain format.