Cavechat.org

Many thanks to Howard for running a great Survey and Cartography session at NSS Convention this year. Despite an errant fire alarm in mid session, all of the talks went off without a hitch and were well received. The wrap up session on digital cartography and cave survey round-tripping was also an unqualified success. If you would like to see more open discussion on survey and cartography at NSS Convention next year please let Howard or myself know!

I also said that I would post a link to the beta version of the virtual cave tour we have been working on for the Mammoth Cave Historic Tour. This is based on the terrestrial LiDAR data collected, and only represents about 500,000 of the nearly 20 million points collected.

The model is beta and slow to load. Please be patient.... http://fragileearthstudios.com/mammoth.html

Navigation is by arrow keys or mouse. Use spacebar to jump over rocks, E to fly and C to land.

Cheers,

Aaron

Interesting, but it kept crashing before starting. Maybe you have to use IE instead of Firefox?

IE does work a lot better. Very interesting!


-Dean

Most of the testing has been done on Google's Chrome browser. In theory it should work with anything that supports java. Having said that, we have seen more issues with Firefox than any other browser.

Cheers,

AA

Oh, and if you fall through the cave and begin falling in to the blue space, just refresh your browser to reset the physics engine.

I see you in there Aaron! Works OK on Chrome for me. Started locking up at first, and the whole "Jibe" thing made me think I was in the wrong place, but it's all good now.

Unity is a pretty nifty game engine. Cool to see it used for other purposes.

At the Digging Session, Steve Peerman showed another virtual cave using a gaming engine. I think he gave Ron Lipiniski credit for doing most of the work. I did not catch the name of the gaming engine because I was not following closely at first. He could make a figure walk or run through the cave. It used a lot of photographs for passage detail, rather than LIDAR scans, making the simulation very realistic. He said how many photos there were and the file size, but I do not want to quote numbers because I would probably get them wrong. Perhaps someone else can give better details.

The final version of the Mammoth virtual cave will be based on over 20,000,000 points (only 500k in current model) and will also have photos rendered to the point cloud.

Aaron

Has this data moved or gone obsolete?