Virtual World Creation with WorldPerfect™

MetaVR WorldPerfect is a terrain-and-content generation system for creating geographically large-scale detailed virtual worlds. With WorldPerfect you can create on a Windows-based PC highly realistic 3D environments, quickly and efficiently from imagery, elevation, and feature source data.

	The Bicycle Lake area of MetaVR's 3D database of NTC, built with WorldPerfect and rendered in VRSG. Click to swap rendered and wireframe views. Click Zoom to see an enlargement.

WorldPerfect takes your GIS data (real-world photographic imagery, digital elevation models, and vector features) and turns it into an immersive world in which you can fly, drive or walk within MetaVR's VRSG real-time scene manager. At a 60 Hz frame rate, you can interactively fly over a city or drive over rugged terrain in the resulting virtual world, with a 6-DOF controller or a joystick, at a rate that mimics traversing the real world.

WorldPerfect's easy-to-use Windows interface automates many time-consuming aspects of building visually accurate 3D worlds. With point-and-click ease you can add high-resolution, location-specific feature content to areas in the form of roads, rivers, and other landscape elements, 3D models of real-world buildings, trees, street elements and so on. You can also design detailed airfields with runways, approach lights, taxiways, and signage. Models from external sources such as Presagis Creator, Blender, and 3D Studio Max can be inserted automatically using GIS vector feature data or by manually digitizing content with the graphical user interface.

The Cassidy MOUT site in MetaVR's Ft. Campbell database, created in WorldPerfect, rendered in VRSG.

With WorldPerfect, a casual user can create simulation and training environments without having to be a terrain expert. System requirements for WorldPerfect are simliar to those of VRSG. In addition, WorldPerfect is available with a complete terrain database generation system.

	Close-up view of the Bicycle Lake area of MetaVR's NTC database built in WorldPerfect.

WorldPerfect can organize and process the enormous resources needed to model large geographic regions at very high (~15 cm) resolution. Such capability is necessary to construct the vast, detailed databases now made viable by the state-of-the-art 3D image generators.

WorldPerfect can draw from a broad range of source data such as DTED, DEM, and ERDAS digital elevation data, satellite or aerial images for geographically specific texturing, source data from National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly NIMA) VMAP, ENVI, ESRI ArcInfo and ArcViewer shapefiles, and models from Presagis Creator, Blender, and 3D Studio Max. WorldPerfect also supports the Navy's Portable Source Initiative (PSI) standard for terrain database source data.

The resulting virtual worlds uphold the complexity and accuracy of the GIS source data. WorldPerfect outputs databases in multiple formats (MetaVR MDX, SAF CTDB, OpenFlight) from the same source data, providing precise correlation of the terrain and feature content.

	Compare images to see the correlation between VRSG, MUSE CSS, and SAF

WorldPerfect has a variety of terrain building features, such as cut-and-fill road insertion, level-of-detail specification, and automated culling of redundant (flat) terrain geometry. Once you specify the location of features such as roads and runways in the user interface, WorldPerfect automatically generates the complex underlying cut-and-fill geometry that characterizes the resulting virtual world.

Extensible palettes for adding custom features and imported models allow the database designer the ability to leverage existing resources quickly, while simultaneously building virtual worlds of the highest fidelity possible. A rich library of fully textured models are included with the WorldPerfect release.

	WorldPerfect's user interface makes virtual world creation simple.

WorldPerfect serves as the primary utility for building production databases for MetaVR's Virtual Reality Scene Generator (VRSG). Direct hooks from WorldPerfect to other desktop applications from third-party vendors such as NGA NIMAMUSE Raster Importer and Adobe PhotoShop are also available.

You can run WorldPerfect on the same system that you use for VRSG, keeping in mind that WorldPerfect uses the Intel hyperthreading feature significantly. Thus, running WorldPerfect on a single CPU platform will benefit from a current machine with hyperthreading (which acts as a virtual dual CPU) such as the Intel Pentium 4 processor that is greater than 2.8 GHz. However the more processors you have, the more effective WorldPerfect processing will be. For example, you will achieve better WorldPerfect performance with a dual machine, such as a dual Intel Xeon processor. An ideal practical system is a dual Xeon 3.2 GHz running Windows XP; as Windows XP creates a virtual dual CPU out of any system using hyperthreading, this system effectively becomes the equivalent of running WorldPerfect on four CPUs.

MetaVR recommends that you use the most current hardware, including the fastest and most capable commercial graphics cards to get the best results from MetaVR's software products. For example, the MetaVR Terrain Database Generation System is designed to hold the large amount of source data typically needed for building large, complex virtual worlds.

You can order WorldPerfect directly from MetaVR.