CHANGING THE LANDSCAPE IN VIRTUAL REALITY
GeoVisionary was developed by Virtalis and the British Geological Survey as specialist software
for high-resolution visualisation of spatial data. One of the initial design goals was to ensure
that data sets for large regions, national to sub-continental, could be loaded simultaneously and
at full resolution, while allowing real-time interaction with the data. One of the major advantages
GeoVisionary offers over other visualisation software (3 & 4D GIS) is its ability to integrate
very large volumes of data from multiple sources, allowing a greater understanding of diverse
spatial datasets.
Virtalis’ 20 years of expertise in Virtual Reality (VR) and handling large engineering CAD datasets
meant that we were uniquely placed to create software capable of high-resolution 3D and 3D stereo visualisation that is limited only by the resolution of the data. GeoVisionary is highly scalable and is able to provide “fly-through” viewing of mid-continent-scale data sets in real-time at full speed. GeoVisionary’s focus is on visualisation combined with useful landscape feature interpretation tools. For example, it allows for digitisation in 3D space, enabling features to be directly on the 3-D elevation model
and orthophotography.
Now, following GeoVisionary’s deployment in a large number of diverse applications around
the world, the development team behind it is planning the next frontier.
“The ability to mark contacts, structures and other geological features while fully immersed in a 3D environment is probably as close to real field mapping on Mars as is possible at the moment”.
Dr. Peter Grindrod, a Planetary Geologist and Aurora Research Fellow at UCL.
