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(A little "typo" in the DEM (Digital Elevation Module) reading part of the program...)

History of Landspeeder.

The predecessor to Landspeeder was VRML work done by Rajiv Ramanathan, Doctoral Student in Urban and Regional Planning, working under Professor Varkki George. They developed a paging scheme for displaying 9 tiles, or sectors, (a 3x3 matrix) of the LEAM output. This was done in VRML with a controller implemented in Java.

Rose Marshack continued the task of developing Landspeeder in VRML and Java, searching for a more stable VRML viewer, as each viewer seemed extremely unstable. Many different solutions were explored, none were found acceptable.

With the advent of Macromedia's Director version 8.5, interactive 3-D programming became a much more stable reality, with output easily deliverable over the internet. Many successful versions of Landspeeder were developed in Director.

In Summer 2003, with much support from Hank Kaczmarski and Ben Schaeffer of the ISL group at Beckman, Landspeeder was ported to C++ and OpenGL and ISL's Syzygy Toolkit for 3-D graphics running on a PC cluster. Landspeeder now runs in the Beckman Cube, and also on Windows and MacOSX computers configured to run the Syzygy Operating System. (thank you Hank and Ben!)

(Landspeeder at Night)

Notes from a Landspeeder Presentation (Spring 2003)

What Landspeeder does -

1. Read in the LEAM data output (sample)
2. Print out (in 3D) the output (sample code)
3. Navigation through the world

   Demo it!

4. Here are a lot of screen shots.

Key technical issues

• Paging scheme
• Showing time-lapse
• Terrain generation
• Little Navigational map
• Creating meshes
  • how to, with texture coordinate maps and textures
  • realistic vs. representational
• tree billboarding
• navigation (radians?!)
• random building placement around cell
• optimization
  • pre-processing - change for era changes
  • make ascii file smaller (don't use -9999, .0000000 etc.) maybe use binary in future (sample1) (sample2)
  • use meshes that we created instead of pre-existing models

How does the software actually work?

It reads in the beginning of the file, decides how many rows and columns there are. Looks at what we want the user's starting point to be. Prints out the first area of cells. Then waits for user input (through the joystick or keyboard.)

When the user moves, we move the camera forward in the world. If the user moves past a certain area, we load new houses in and subtract the others.

History

• Rajiv, Lei - grad students who had worked out parts of the problem using VRML on an NT box with CosmoPlayer. - big step forward: "page" the output in sections because it all won't fit in memory at the same time
• CosmoPlayer was bad, stopped development on it and it would run for like 30 secs at most.
• New solution needed.

Switched to linux - VRWave and FreeWRL. Performance problems and incompatibilities.

• Joined VRWave listserv - 3 emails that day with people asking me for help.
• Installing VRWave in a certain Linux version - click for email example

Went to Director. Had just come out with 3D capabilities.

Early Landspeeder Pictures

1. VRML multicolored boxes
2. "Newbox 0"
3. Landspeeder 01
4. Landspeeder 08
5. Landspeeder 17

   Bring in error pictures (1) (2)

Next steps

• Force-feedback joystick
• more representational
• fix terrain texture - add DOQ (Digital Ortho Quad) photo to bottom - but it's b+w and icky
• problem with building indices are a bit off