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St. Mantler, G. Hesina, M. Greiner, W. Purgathofer:
"GEARViewer: A State of the Art Real-Time Geospatial Visualization Framework";
Talk: Real CORP, Essen, Germany; 2011-05-18 - 2011-05-20; in: "Proceedings REAL CORP 2011 Tagungsband", Proceedings of CORP 2011, (2011), ISBN: 978-3-9503110-1-3; 345 - 354.

Geospatial visualization is playing an increasingly important part in the planning and public discussion of infrastructure projects. In addition to pre-rendered highly realistic imagery, interactive viewers have become an important tool for this task. Advances in rendering technology and performance have reduced the gap in visual quality between pre-rendered imagery and real-time applications, and the additional possibilities of a live visualization may become important tools in the decision making process. Historically, the step from GIS data or a highly detailed architectural model to a representation that is suitable for real-time display has been complex and required a very finely tuned workflow. On the other side, the general public is relatively spoiled by the extremely high quality of computer games and CGI films. Naturally, a tremendous amount of work and time is typically spent to fully optimize computer games for the available hardware. This is usually not possible for geospatial visualization tasks, but nonetheless current interactive viewing applications must strive to achieve similar quality and performance to be successful. In this paper, we present GEARViewer, a state of the art geospatial rendering framework developed at VRVis. Developed in close cooperation with major stakeholders in the Austrian road and railway infrastructure, it bridges the gap between GIS applications and real-time rendering, and achieves a high degree of realism and performance while supporting many of the tasks involved in geospatial visualizations.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_201401.pdf