Interactive Display of Scenes with Annotations

ThreeDView is a computer program that enables high-performance interactive display of real-world scenes with annotations. ThreeDView was developed primarily as a component of the Science Activity Planner (SAP) software, wherein it is to be used to display annotated images of terrain acquired by exploratory robots on Mars and possibly other remote planets. The images can be generated from sets of multiple-texture image data in the Visible Scalable Terrain (ViSTa) format, which was described in "Format for Interchange and Display of 3D Terrain Data" (NPO-30600) NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 28, No. 12 (December 2004), page 25. In ThreeDView, terrain data can be loaded rapidly, the geometric level of detail and texture resolution can be selected, false colors can be used to represent scientific data mapped onto terrain, and the user can select among navigation modes. ThreeDView consists largely of modular Java software components that can easily be reused and extended to produce new high-performance, application-specific software systems for displaying images of three-dimensional real-world scenes.