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Digital Earth > TerravisionTM > User Guide > X/Motif > "Views" Menu > The 3-D Viewer

The 3-D Viewer

The 3-D Viewer allows you to navigate around the terrain in 3-D. That is, the elevation data are used to create the 3-D geometry that models the undulation of the actual terrain, and the imagery data are used as texture maps for this geometry.

Mouse Controls

You can navigate around the 3-D environment using a mouse by moving the cursor into the viewer window and using the mouse buttons as follows:
  • Middle Mouse Button: rotates the current viewpoint as you drag the mouse but does not change your location, i.e. this can be considered analgous to simply moving your head to look around the environment. You can also use this button to stop if you are currently moving.

  • Left Mouse Button: accelerates you through the environment. You can move the mouse while you are moving forward to change your trajectory.

  • Right Mouse Button: decelerates your forward momentum, eventually moving you backwards through the environment once you reach zero velocity. You can move the mouse while you are moving forward to change your trajectory.
If you depress one of the SHIFT keys on the keyboard, then the behaviour of the mouse navigation changes to give you viewer-centric navigation as follows:
  • SHIFT + Middle Mouse Button: slides the current viewpoint to the left or right, up or down, depending upon how you move the mouse from the initial mouse click. You can think of this as equivalent to side-stepping or bobbing your head up or down.

  • SHIFT + Left Mouse Button: accelerates you forward along the direction that you are currently facing. You can move the mouse while you are moving forward in order to slide the viewpoint during the motion.

  • SHIFT + Right Mouse Button: decelerates your forward momentum, eventually moving you backwards from the way that you are currently facing. Again, you can move the mouse while you are moving forward in order to slide the viewpoint during the motion.

Keyboard Controls

You can press a number of keys while the mouse is over the 3-D Viewer in order to quickly access a number of features. Currently, the following key strokes are supported:

  • 'N' - display the Navigation Settings dialog

  • 'R' - display the Rendering Settings dialog

  • 'D' - display the Debug Settings dialog

  • 'V' - display the VRML Features Selection dialog

  • 'C' - display the Viewpoint Control dialog

  • 'S' - display the Viewpoint Status dialog

  • 'B' - display the Viewpoint Bookmarks dialog

  • 'O' - return to the default (Origin) viewpoint

  • 'L' - toggle the display of the SRI logo

  • '2' - switch to 2-D constrained viewing mode

  • '3' - switch to 3-D viewing mode

  • 'H' - toggle the display of the Heads Up Display

  • 'M' - toggle display of the menu bar at the top of the window

  • 'W' - toggle display of the web icons panel at the bottom of the window

  • 'F' - toggle the full screen mode

  • 'A' - toggle the display of the status bar at the bottom of the window

  • 'Esc' - close the 3-D viewer

  • 'Ctrl+P' - Play the current flight path

  • 'Ctrl+S' - Stop the currently playing flight path

  • 'Ctrl+U' - Continue a previously stopped flight path

  • 'Ctrl+T' - Jump to the first viewpoint in the current path

  • 'Ctrl+N' - Jump to the next viewpoint in the current path

  • 'Ctrl+V' - Jump to the previous viewpoint in the current path

  • 'Ctrl+E' - Jump to the last viewpoint in the current path

Menus

The Out the Window viewer has a menu bar along the top of the window with a number of options. These are as follows:

  • Datasets : options for managing the set of datasets that are being displayed

  • Options : options for controlling the render settings and the user's navigation.

  • Viewpoint : options for controlling the user's position and orientation in the 3-D environment.

  • Paths : the flight path facility of TerraVision

  • Window : options for controlling the window display

  • Link : options for linking to other TerraVisionTM viewers

  • Help : help pages on how to use the 3-D viewer

Heads Up Display

The Heads Up Display (HUD) provides a textual overlay in the bottom-left corner of the display with various useful pieces of information. Currently this includes the following, as well as a list of all currently loaded terrain datasets.

  • The (latitude, long, elevation) of your viewpoint

  • Your (yaw, pitch, roll) orientation

In addition to this information, there is a debug heads up display that provides further information. You can access this by pressing SHIFT and the H key on the keyboard. The debug HUD includes the previous information plus the following.

  • The near and far clipping plane values

  • The current frame number and the number of tiles in the scene

  • The 1 second data burst rate into the application (MBit/s) and the total amount of data read so far

  • The frame rate of the graphics system (instantaneous and averaged over 5 second)

You can toggle the display of the HUD from the "Options/Render Options" menu entry, or pressing 'H' on the keyboard.

Status Bar

The Status Bar is a strip at the bottom of the window which provides a number of useful pieces of information. It has the following fields:

Viewpoint Name Number of Datasets Navigation Mode View Mode

The Viewpoint Name has the name of the bookmark for the current location assuming that you have just jumped to a certain bookmark. If you move from this viewpoint, then this field will be empty.

The Number of Datasets field displays the number of GeoSets that are currently being displayed in the viewer. You can load new GeoSets via the "File/Open Dataset" option, and you can also select which subset of all loaded dataset you want to display via the "Datasets/Dataset Display" option/

The Navigation Mode tells you what will happen when you use your mouse to navigate. In "Fly Mode" your mouse lets you change the (yaw, pitch, roll) and forward velocity; in "Slide Mode" you have a pan and zoom type metaphor, in "Fly To Mode" the left button is used to pick a point to zoom up to.

The View Mode tells you whether the current viewer is operating in 3-D mode, or if the 2-D constrain mode is on. In 2-D mode, the viewpoint is constrained to always looks down and a "Slide" Navigation Mode is enforced.

You can toggle the display of the Status Bar by selecting the "Window/Show Status Bar" menu option, or pressing 'A' on the keyboard.

Web Icons

Along the bottom of the viewer window you will see a number of icons, such as the SRI logo and TerraVisionTM logo. Clicking over these will display the appropriate WWW home page, e.g. the SRI logo will take you to the SRI International Home Page, http://www.sri.com/. N.B. You will have to have the command "netscape" in your path for this to work. If you already have a netscape session running, then TerraVisionTM will try to open the URL using this session rather than trying to spawn another netscape process.

You can toggle the display of the Web Icon panel by selecting the "Window/Show Web Icons" menu option, or pressing 'W' on the keyboard.

 

 

Copyright ©2000 SRI International. All rights reserved.

For more information, please contact: digital-earth@ai.sri.com.
Last updated: Thursday, 08-Mar-2001 16:44:46 PST.