Among the criteria that define a successful Research and Development (R&D) effort perhaps the most important one is the capacity to bring a fresh approach to pushing the limits and conventions of a particular field. The developed technology must be unique, robust, useful and even exciting for its users. Developing unique technology requires a unique team and the R&D department of the GeoTech Group fits this description quite well.

The mostly young members of the team, who came on board with strong credentials, do not, however have traditional backgrounds in GIS. In addition, the R&D department is physically isolated from other departments of the Group. This setup has been designed to produce unique technology in the field of GIS and remote sensing, challenging the conventions and boundaries of current technology. A possible pitfall of such an approach could come in the form of developing technology that isn't accessible, but this has been avoided by rapidly incorporating the new software into active projects. Thus the intuitiveness, robustness and usefulness of all R&D products are constantly under check.

Having fresh technology that was built from the ground up with a precise vision brings about additional advantages. The most important of these is the industry leading quality and performance of both GTVS and GeoView. The GTVS software allows navigation of hundreds of square kilometers of terrain in real-time (60 frames per second performance) even on laptops, with absolutely no loss in satellite image quality (See pictures below).

GeoView on the other hand is a powerful GIS component with arguably the fastest query times in the market. Being developed as an OCX component guarantees the ease of integration with numerous popular products and diverse customization options.

Recently these two technologies were merged to create a real-time simulation involving 16,000 realistically textured buildings on virtual terrain. Later 3,000 of the structures that were determined to be at risk in case of an earthquake were animated to create a massive real-time disaster simulation.

What makes this project impressive is that the creation of these buildings was automated via a GIS database at a rate of roughly 2,000 buildings per second. This level of structure creation makes it viable to create and render cities in real-time with minimal memory and processor requirements. In other words, using this technology a user can choose to fly (or walk) to any location in a city with realistic 3-D buildings and miscellaneous structures and still be able to access information and make queries on a common PC.

The future looks bright for GeoTech. With these technologies at our disposal the R&D department of GeoTech is initiating a massive multi-disciplinary effort to create a revolutionary protocol for recording and navigating location-based information. This effort will see further growth both in the number and the diversity of the R&D staff and will be completed by the year 2006. Further information regarding the specifics and the scope of this exciting technology will be revealed in subsequent articles on GeoTech R&D under the TechnoloGIS column.