This has been a transformational technique in graphics and mapping and I think its worthwhile to recognize where the technique came from. As far as I can tell t

This has been a transformational technique in graphics and mapping and I think its worthwhile to recognize where the technique came from. As far as I can tell the origin of the technique described here can be traced back to SGI prior to Keyhole as published in 2002. [1] This "Clip Map" technique is a key enabler of applications like Google Earth because of how efficiently it pages data. Recall that Google Earth was the product of an acquisition of a company called Keyhole. Named after the spy satellite, a reference to the recently declassified satellite imagery they were using. Its also interesting to note Al Gore played an important role in declassifying this data. [2] But to make use of all of this imagery a new efficient algorithm was needed for loading and rendering the data. This is what the Clip Map paper describes and enabled the iconic zoom from space to the surface of the earth with real time rendering of satellite imagery. According to Michael T. Jones. "Keyhole started by accident. The earliest possible origin of Keyhole actually lies with me. I worked with a company called Silicon Graphics (SGI). One of the companies I worked with had created a program to view satellite imagery where you could zoom in and see the imagery in great detail. It was used in the Bosnia peace talks to draw the border." [3] "Before its acquisition by Google, Michael was CTO of Keyhole Corporation, the company that developed the technology used today in Google Earth. He was also CEO of Intrinsic Graphics, and earlier, was Director of Advanced Graphics at Silicon Graphics." [4] It is interesting to note that a German company is now suing Google over Google earth and possibly this very technique. [5] Are ART+COM and Terravison the company and software Michael Jones was speaking of? The real power of this technique is that it allows you to pre-page the data in tiles that can be easily loaded over the web and are sized specifically to live graphics memory. It optimizes both the IO this way and off-loads the mesh creation process from CPU to the GPU. In 2004 Microsoft research published an expansion of the of the Clip Map technique that does just that. [6] A basic demo and source in C++ available [7] and I have also found SpiderGL uses this technique [8] One thing I have not found yet is a good discussion of implementing collision detection in conjunction with this technique if anyone has found any resources on this I would be grateful. [1]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/courses/2002/BigData/papers/Texturing/Clipmap.pdf http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/courses/2002/BigData/papers/... [2]: http://www.realityprime.com/blog/2006/07/notes-on-the-origin-of-google-earth http://www.realityprime.com/blog/2006/07/notes-on-the-origin... [3]: http://geospatialworld.net/FirstPerson/ArticleView.aspx?aid=18979 http://geospatialworld.net/FirstPerson/ArticleView.aspx?aid=... [4]: http://www.uoc.edu/portal/en/sala-de-premsa/actualitat/noticies/2010/noticia_109.html http://www.uoc.edu/portal/en/sala-de-premsa/actualitat/notic... [5]: http://www.eweek.com/cloud/google-sued-for-alleged-google-earth-patent-infringement.html http://www.eweek.com/cloud/google-sued-for-alleged-google-ea... [6]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/gpugcm.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/gpugcm.p... [7]: http://filougk.blogspot.com/2007/03/gpu-geometry-clipmaps-source.html http://filougk.blogspot.com/2007/03/gpu-geometry-clipmaps-so... [8]: http://spidergl.org/example.php?id=8 http://spidergl.org/example.php?id=8