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QT Viewer™

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Product History

The QT Viewer™ grew out of the need to quickly visualize and manipulate the very large data sets generated by LIDAR surveys - which often exceeded the capabilities of other products available at the time - without requiring the use of large and expensive high-end graphics super-computers in the field. The QT Viewer™ was the primary XYZ data processing tool of the U.S. Army Rapid Terrain Visualization program.

The QT Viewer™ was designed to maximize both speed and potential model size on Windows desktop and laptop platforms. Capable of displaying and manipulating in real time models of up to 200 million points (2 GB model size) QT Viewer™ can very quickly generate gridded surface models from raw XYZ data (~60 million points in 10 minutes on a 2.4 GHz Pentium IV with 1GB memory).

The QT Viewer™ could quickly and easily import, display, and manipulate 3-D LIDAR data, but was also perfectly suitable for other sources of georegistered 3-D surface data. The QT Viewer™ could manipulate models of up to two gigabytes (depending upon hardware resources) in real time that had been converted to one of its native formats, as well as importing raw height field data (ordered lists of floating point altitudes), GEOTIFF DEMs, and NIMA DTEDs. The QT Viewer™ could also generate models from raw ASCII XYZ data (with or without intensity) and create and display either gridded and triangulated surface models or ungridded point cloud models. The QT Viewer™ also included many other data manipulation features such as: visually cutting/cropping data, overlaying photo imagery, performing mensuration, and generating line-of-sight or shadow maps.

Original Features Visualize and Manipulate Very Large Models Manipulate models of up to 200 million points / 2 gigabytes in real time. Display both surface and cloud-point models. Designed to run on Windows Desktops with consumer-grade video cards.
Baltimore with LIDAR Intensity	LIDAR Strip with Altitude Coloration
Overlay Photos and Imagery Images and photography could be overlaid on top of models either orthographically by specifying the image position and orientation or projectively by specifying the camera parameters.
Map Image Overlaid on Model	Image Projected onto Model
Generate Models from Raw XYZ Data
ASCII XYZ Data could be quickly and easily imported, triangulated, and used to generated either gridded surface models or ungridded point cloud models. The QT Viewer™ could triangulate and grid ~60 million points in 10 minutes on a 2.4 GHz windows machine with sufficient memory.	ASCII Import Utility
Provides Many Other 3-D Data Manipulation Features
Shadows by Time/Date/Geo-position	Line-of-Sight Maps
Contour Lines	Graphical Cut/Crop of Models
Other Features Graphical model mensuration. Render directly to arbitrarily large sized TIFF images. Record fly-through movies for playback.