Geospatial Technology Inside VR-TheWorld Server and the MAK Earth Terrain Engine

Pelican Mapping has world-leading expertise in 3D visualization of geospatial data. The MAK Earth terrain engine that is built into VR-Vantage, VR-Forces, and VR-Engage leverages technology and software libraries that MAK has licensed from Pelican – to stream GIS source terrain layers from external servers using web-mapping standards, and to assist in generating 3D vegetation, buildings, roads, and other elements of the terrain based on that source data. MAK and Pelican engineers have worked closely together for 15 years to tightly integrate their shader infrastructure and code with ours, so that, for example, VR-Vantage's high-dynamic-rendering, dynamic shadows, physically-based-rendering, ambient occlusion, atmospheric models, and physics-based sensor and radar simulation work on content we ingest or generate using Pelican’s technology. Beyond visualization, Pelican’s streaming-terrain and procedural-generation code has been fully integrated into MAK’s high-performance collision engine, which is used for terrain intersections in the VR-Forces back-end. This ensures full correlation between the simulation and visualization components of the MAK ONE suite – even in the face of procedurally-generated terrain elements and dynamic terrain (craters, ditches, berms, tank scrape that are created and published by VR-Forces, and reflected in the VR-Vantage 3D scene).
We also heavily leverage technology licensed from Pelican within our VR-TheWorld streaming terrain server. We work together with Pelican engineers to build the VR-TheWorld Server UI, add support for new formats, and obtain and curate data to be distributed as part of MAK's VR-TheWorld Server product.