Skimming virtually around 3D scenery is no longer the preserve of experts. New software developed in Europe lets users browse and interact in three dimensions with any part of our planet. Everyone from tourists to land planners stand to benefit. Terabytes of data daily flow downwards from remote-sensing satellites. Other useful data come from aerial photos and base maps. This information is commonly used for everything from town and country planning to tourism development.

Six partners from France, Italy and Germany spent over three years studying ways of exploiting all this data, for the benefit of society. They came up with a unique program, which uses innovative Virtual Reality techniques to browse very high resolution 3D geographic information.

"Using Vplanet Explorer, anyone can set off on a journey to discover new regions in 3D, rather than staring at a flat map and trying to picture its scenery," says Eric Martin, coordinator of the IST project Vplanet. "With the click of a mouse, they can fluently fly through terrain in real time, on a standard PC."

The project"s software merges data from different sources into a single 3D database, using techniques such as filtering, correlation and specially developed 3D algorithms. The partners concentrated their work on surface areas and sub-metric resolution, taking advantage of improvements in pixel resolution in today's satellite data.

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