TECHNOLOGY SUMMARY

		What is this product?
	The APL QT Viewer™ is a 3-D model generation and manipulation package developed at APL to facilitate real-time manipulation of large amounts of complex 3-D data in real time with standard PC hardware. Using cost-effective off-the-shelf 3D chips developed primarily for the video-game market, real-time display of large models is achieved using improved data structures and on-the-fly level of detail rendering. View PDF >

The QT Viewer™ was designed to quickly and easily import, display, and manipulate 3-D LIDAR data, but is also perfectly suitable for other sources of georegistered 3-D surface data. The QT Viewer™ can manipulate models of up to two gigabytes (depending upon hardware resources) in real time that have 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™ can 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 includes many other data manipulation features such as: visually cutting/cropping data, overlaying photo imagery, performing mensuration, and generating line-of-sight or shadow maps.

Benefits

The QT Viewer™ is designed to maximize both speed and potential model size on Windows desktop and laptop platforms. It is capable of displaying and manipulating in real time models of up to 200 million points (2 GB model size) and 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 target platform is a mid-to-high range Windows desktop or laptop with a mid-to-high end consumer level 3-D video card.

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™ is currently the primary XYZ data processing tool of the U.S. Army Rapid Terrain Visualization program, and is available from APL licensee, Applied Imagery, LLC . Contact info@appliedimagery.com for details.

© 2002 The Johns Hopkins University.