Join us this month as Greg Peele discusses virtual worlds.



What does it take to build immersive and realistic three-dimensional synthetic environments? Commercial gaming, military simulations, and corporate training have all heavily developed the software techniques and platforms for building virtual worlds over the past five decades. In this talk, we will conduct an introductory-level overview of the concepts used to build virtual worlds including terrain representation, semantic object models, coordinate systems and map projections, data sources and production pipelines, and analytic services that support player and A.I. behaviors to interact with the world. We will also touch on how modern game engines such as Unity and Unreal apply these concepts and where higher-level languages such as Ruby fit into this ecosystem.



Greg Peele is an Orlando, FL native with over 10 years of software experience participating in design, supervisor and implementation of many key systems for RUGUD (Rapid Unified Generation of Urban Databases), a system that generates correlated terrain databases from real-world Geographic Information System (GIS) data. He is best known for his technical, and then managerial, roles with Layered Terrain Format (LTF), a specification designed for efficient environment data interchange. Through his efforts the first C++ software version of LTF was delivered months ahead of schedule. These projects have been used by the US Army Research Lab, NASA, the US Military Academy at West Point and the US Office of Naval Research.