OGC User article

The staff at Ping Interactive Broadband in Australia is tackling a problem as big as the earth. For some time the team has dreamed of a 3D interactive, Web-based world map. The application, they hope, will include a hypermedia viewer that renders geographic information in high-definition real time 3D over broadband networks. Another key idea: the platform will allow users to publish data into the system. With a grant from Telstra Broadband Fund, the project, called 3D Metanet Atlas Platform (3map), is moving right along.

Ping releases 3map alpha: capable of browsing 3D earth database in realtime, zooming from orbit down to human scale, running simple test content

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Ping releases our Metadata framework, including:

• Definition of core metadata element set
• Definition of sample extension element sets

A key goal of 3map is to afford effective information seeking within large geospatial datasets with a large component of non-textual information. To this end, we have chosen to create a library of structured metadata, pervasively annotating geospatial features in our database.

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Ping releases our implementation of database design allowing users to read from and write to a geospatial database

An analysis of 3D game consoles by Ping, published in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, reveals that graphics speed is moving considerably faster than Moore's Law predicts.

At current rates, we are likely to see massive immersive VR worlds running at five billion polygons per second in a mass-market toy by 2012 at the latest at probably by June 2007

See the graph here.

Sydney Morning Herald/Melbourne Age article

It started as a 3D enthusiast's dream - a detailed online model of Earth. Now Telstra is funding development of the virtual planet in the hope that broadband users will populate its countries, build cities and travel through time to key places in history.

A plan to re-create the planet using gigabytes of geospatial data won $250,000 in the latest round of grants from the Telstra Broadband Fund. Australian developer Ping Interactive is using the grant and the online modelling language VRML to build something that is more than just a representation of the world. It will become home to a unique online community.

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Ping releases design documents detailing how users will:

• Navigate in the Virtual Reality geospatial enviroment
• Place nodes in geospace
• Select geometric archetypes for nodes
• Annotate nodes with structured metadata
• Filter their view (to manage complexity) using dynamic queries

Ping releases our Open Source framework and tools for translating terrain data and images to different formats and generating multiresolution versions optimised for online broadband delivery.

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To ensure that Australian broadband practice remains at the cutting edge internationally, the Fund aims to support the pioneers, the innovators, and the new thinkers in the broadband development arena.

Ping Interactive Broadband Pty. Ltd. aims to develop the 3D Metanet Atlas Platform (3MAP) - an open source framework for building Australian rich media 3D map applications and content. It will include a hypermedia viewer to render geographically based information in high-definition real time 3D over broadband networks. 3MAP aims to deliver streamed rich media such as quality images, video or sound, located on topological maps, in an immersive and familiar world.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

GIS looks set to become more accessible, writes Nicole Manktelow.

An ambitious project to map the entire world on a 3-D Web site will ultimately let users add details and even models of their own homes and other landmarks, while using little more than freely available software.

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