Terrain Software and Projects - Noncommercial

see also: commercial software and government/academic projects

In March 2011, the WebGL platform became available for doing OpenGL directly from JavaScript in a supporting browser (Firefox>=4 or Chrome>=10) - 3D with no plugins. Very quickly, some geoviz applications appeared for it. Because the software runs on the client in JavaScript, they are effectively open, and mostly non-commercial (Cesium is a semi-commercial alternative.)

WebGL Globe is just a spinny globe for canned datasets

WebGL Earth (live demo) does paging of imagery sources (e.g. TMS), but not elevation, yet.

OpenWebGlobe SDK Can do imagery, elevation as tiled TINs, and even streamable colorized point clouds(!) The demo includes a chunk of Switzerland.

Stavros's Project Windstorm demo An impressive WebGL implementation of a smooth, tiling, well instrumented terrain engine with a nice GUI. It uses geomipmaps with strips or skirts, detail textures, time of day lighting with cast shadows, and more. The issue of how to do smooth paging in JS (no multithreading) is addressed.



three.js is a WebGL library that enables many projects including some like Trigger Rally that feature terrain

Potree is a WebGL point-cloud viewer which can handle datasets large enough (billions of points) to describe moderate terrain areas. Includes a converter from other pointcloud formats (like LAS/LAZ) to its own format. Based on three.js. BSD license, grew out of academic work at TU Wien.

