We put the whole Earth on screen and make it navigable. Terrain, imagery, elevation, and live GIS data, rendered in 3D and fast enough to fly through. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash "Earth" tool inspired what became Google Earth. Some of those seminal engineers ended up developing open source toolkits like OpenSceneGraph, which later enabled osgGIS and then osgEarth. We have worked with osgEarth since its early days, ported it to platforms its authors never targeted, and built the terrain pipelines behind flight simulators, avionics displays, and autonomous-vehicle map systems.
Our typical stack is osgEarth and OpenSceneGraph, or VulkanSceneGraph and Pelican Mapping's Rocky as the world moves to Vulkan. We also use Cesium and CesiumJS on the web, and GDAL/OGR underneath for the format and projection work nobody enjoys but everything depends on. We generate terrain and imagery/cartography tile sets, bring in LIDAR and elevation data, handle coordinate systems and datums, and draw MIL-STD-2525 symbology on top. We've done whole-world and CONUS databases for offline navigation systems and airborne synthetic vision databases, and have experience with vast data management and processing.
We even known about non-Earth planets and their unique geodesy requirements -- what datum does The Moon use, and what geodesy parameters are commonly used on Mars? Our work and expertise literally is not bounded even by planet Earth, but extends into the planets and the stars. We are extremely familiar with geoids, ellipsoids, datums, ECEF, reprojection and unprojection, in 2D and 3D. We were pioneering computer geospatial 3D in the early 1990s.
Some of our work includes: porting osgEarth and OSG to iOS and GLES for an avionics maker; VirtualPlanetBuilder terrain for airborne simulation; countless map widgets, convoy tracking, and tile-set generation for an autonomous Army ground vehicle; subsurface geology visualization for an energy program under a DOE grant; LIDAR and UAV derived geospatial asset production, and format and paging work on GDAL itself. We even helped make a giant continental-scale map literally carved into stone.
Terrain breaks in specific and insidious ways. A horizontal datum mismatch puts the target a hundred meters off, a faulty tile pyramid stalls the frame rate. A vertical datum mismatch can mean the difference between crashing into an obstacle, and not. This is the part we are good at, because we've been in the trenches of geospatial/3D for decades. And we are very good at it.
Who works on it
AlphaPixel is a US-owned small business, founded in 2004, with seven senior developers who each have 25-plus years in 3D. DLA DD2345 / ITAR registered. We contribute to the open-source geospatial stack and extend it under NDA, and we do not resell a mapping platform, so the recommendation you get is the one that fits your problem.
Talk to us
Tell us what you need to see on the map and where the data comes from. Start a conversation, or read how we run consulting and software development engagements.
