About Ping
Ping was formed in 2002 in response to a realisation that the conditions now exist for the emergence of a Digital Earth populated with structured data, and supporting truly useful virtual reality cities.
These conditions are:
- The publication and adoption of open standards and open source software for the sharing of geospatial and virtual reality data
- The trend towards increased quality and free access to spatial data and imagery
- The widespread uptake of broadband internet
- The bundling of fast 3D hardware in desktop PCs
Our Services
Ping provides consulting services regarding:
- Realtime 3D visualisation of architecture, terrain, cities and planets
- Publishing geospatial data on the web
- Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
- Geospatial databases
- Spatial Decision Support Systems
- Geospatial search engines
- Integrating all of the above with your existing systems
using Open Standards and Free and Open Source Software.
We also provide interoperability with proprietary GIS systems and consumer front-ends to geospatial data such as Google Earth.
Our consulting clients include the NSW Department of Housing, the WA Department of Land Administration, and the City of Sydey.
Please contact us with any enquiries.
Our Products
For the last four years Ping has been developing 3map, a collaborative Open Source geospatial VR engine, built on enterprise database technology and open standards.
3map powers Ping's planet-earth Free virtual earth publishing and search engine and the NSW Department of Housing/UNSW research project A Spatial Decision Support System for Public Housing.
The early development of 3map was supported by the Telstra Broadband Fund, and components of our Free Software are in use by the US Naval Postgraduate School for terrain simulation, in various virtual tourism applications such as VR maps of the Dolomite Mountains in Italy and the Aeolian Islands, and by the Westen Australian Department of Land Administration.
The entire product is available for download as Free Software. We can also license the product to you if you require the ability to embed 3map in a proprietary system; please contact us for more details.
Our team
The principals of Ping are individuals who have been working at the leading edge of this emerging field on high-profile mission-critical applications. Ping team members live in Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast, communicating over the net and in face-to-face meetings.
Our user experience team is led by Viveka Weiley, and software engineering by Chris Thorne.
Ping is a research-driven practice, and our team members regularly present papers and tutorials on virtual planet and city building at international conferences.
We are committed to Free & Open Source software, Open Standards and collaborative processes. These are the most effective techniques to deal with projects such as virtual cities, where the scope for contribution by a large number of stakeholders in all sectors is considerable.
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