MetaVR 3D Layering Control Plugin for ESRI ArcMap

MetaVR™ 3D Layering Control Plugin for ESRI ArcMap is an interface to MetaVR’s 3D real-time Virtual Reality Scene Generator™ (VRSG™) terrain databases that enables you to dynamically visualize in layers the various linear and point features that make up the virtual world. This 3D visualization plugin is built on the industry standard ESRI ArcGIS 9 product line.

Visualizing elements as layers enables users to disable a cultural element so that it is no longer visible. The ability to do so is important for applications such as after-action and during-action review of people instrumented with location registering equipment. In the case of training at Ft. Benning, live soldiers can be visualized while they are inside a real building mapped to a corresponding virtual building at the McKenna urban warfare training center by making the outer walls in the virtual world semi-transparent. This enables users to visualize more easily what is going on inside the building from a more abstract level.

In the set of images above, the user is making a specific building in the exercise semi-transparent with the intent to observe live-instrumented soldiers moving about the interior of the structure.

The plugin operates on VRSG cultural and linear features that are listed in a cultural features file (.clt file) with similarly named textures, by controlling the ArcMap layer control.

The set of images below illustrate how the plugin is currently being fielded by a customer who uses ArcMap as a controller station for VRSG. Users at the McKenna MOUT site use the ArcMap interface for displaying features in the VRSG database that are now dynamically selectable for enabling or disabling the visibility. In addition to the semi-transparent building example above, users can turn off the display of 3D features in order to see where all the soldiers are in the training site.

The relationship between the ArcGIS workstation and VRSG channels is one-to-many; a single instance of the plugin installed on a networked machine can control the visibility of elements in all VRSG channels on the network. The plugin sends out packets on the DIS network, which means one instance of the plugin can control as many VRSG channels as are participating in a given DIS-powered exercise. The GIS software and the plugin do not need to be installed on the machine that is running VRSG.

A MetaVR custom DIS PDU controls the visibility of an object defined by an ID in the .clt file or a set of triangles with a given texture name. Transparency is supported, thus the visibility is defined in the range of 0-255. VRSG version 5 has support for handling these PDUs.

In ArcMap, you simply specify in the MetaVR plugin dialog box the DIS network settings for one or more VRSG channels. The plugin listens for events from the layer control. Whenever a change is made to the layers (such as visibility state changes or the addition of new items), the MetaVR plugin mirrors the changes on the DIS network using a custom PDU. This means that the visibility of the items in the VRSG scene is synchronized with the visibility of the items in in the ArcMap window.

Any objects (features or entities) that you want to control by the layer control must be external to the database, that is, rendered in VRSG via the database's cultural feature (.clt) file. Compiled features cannot be controlled. You can control linear and areal features only by texture; you can turn a given texture on or off in the whole scene. This means that you cannot control two or more road segments that share the same texture (as is usually the case) individually; the texture is either completely on or off.

For the ArcMap plugin to know the texture names or IDs of objects listed in the database's .clt file, all linears and areals and objects in the .clt file must be represented in shapefiles that store the texture name or .clt file ID as attributes. The plugin is delivered with a command-line utility that parses a .clt file and converts it into a set of shapefiles that have all of the necessary attributes.

The plugin has been used at MetaVR to refine the placement of features on the Ft. Benning database using survey data taken at the McKenna MOUT site. Survey points were brought into the VRSG environment via cultural feature data files with survey points mapped to survey sphere models as shown in the example below.

The MetaVR 3D Layering Control Plugin for ESRI ArcMap requires any license level of ArcGIS version 9 (ArcView, ArcEditor, or ArcInfo) and VRSG version 5.

MetaVR is a business partner of the ESRI Developer Program.

Contact MetaVR sales to order this plugin.