Since the '90s, STK has visualized the geometric relationships in 3D between land, sea, air, and space assets over time. Our 3D engine has been specifically designed around the core strength of AGI: astrodynamics. Given the emphasis that STK places on space, the engine is adept at precisely rendering very close and very far objects in the same view. Years of feedback have guided the engine's development to meet our customers' analytical needs for situational awareness, geospatial intelligence, spacecraft mission design and operations, etc. With Point Break, we are taking all that experience and lessons learned to allow our customers to use that same 3D engine in their own applications.
The first evidence of Point Break development in our configuration management system dates to October 23, 2000, and was for the UNIX platform. (I won’t say who wrote that code, but if you mention Red Dawn in his vicinity, he’ll spontaneously scream, “Wolverines!” He’ll also get weepy to any reference to Love Actually. He’s very emotional.) Back then, it was called PL VO (Programmer’s Library Visualization Option) or Stand-Alone VO.
Due to other priorities, development stopped in 2001.
On October, 2006, development started anew. Surprisingly, the work done in 2000-2001 allowed us in just a few days to extract the 3D code from STK and create an MFC application with a 3D window containing a spinning Earth. Going from an MFC application to a production quality component takes time. We expect that our first release will be late this year.
Point Break is a component that exposes our engine through Microsoft COM interfaces. These interfaces include: globe terrain and imagery management; 3D models; primitives, such as triangle meshes, surface polygons, and polylines; overlays; text; scene attributes, such as lighting; and, camera control.
While Point Break will come with a significant feature set, there will be times when you'll need your own unique functionality. For that, you can extend Point Break through its plugin architecture. The triangle mesh primitive, for example, is a plugin that implements the primitive interface. A primitive could be as simple as a box, or as complicated as a city. Another example is our globe image reader plugin, which we've used to render WMS and Yahoo Map data onto the globe.
Point Break uses universal resource identifiers (URIs), rather than file names, to specify data resources. URI examples are "file:///C:/temp/mars.jp2" and "http://www.myserver.com/ship.dae". They allow your data to be stored anywhere: locally, on your network, on the internet.
Early on, we decided that STK would use Point Break. That would help define what interfaces a typical application would need and provide real testing of those interfaces. Point Break also immediately improves STK; look forward to rendering WMS and Yahoo Map data in the 3d window soon, for example. Elements of Point Break are already being used in STK 8.1.
Developers writing .NET applications using AGI’s Dynamic Geometry Library (DGL) can use Point Break for 3D visualization. Because we are using COM, 4DX and RT3 developers can use Point Break. We expect the Point Break install size to be small. The size of our current version's executable code is 25 mb. We have yet to determine the data install size, but we expect that to also be small.
This post should give you a feel for Point Break and for what we're trying to accomplish. We're excited where we are headed, and hope you are too.
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