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SEEING THE REAL WORLD AS IT REALLY IS A White Paper on MultiGen-Paradigm's Vision for the 3D-GIS Marketplace "Our continuing commitment to our customers is to provide a complete solution for the processing, management, analysis and visualization of geo-spatial information in realtime and in 3D." At MultiGen-Paradigm, Inc., our team is focused on a singular vision. We want to create the technology that allows people to experience the real world as it really is - in realtime and in 3D. In most human endeavors, how well we do usually depends on how well we "see." Whether you are a town planner trying to visualize the impact of a new mall, or an architect exploring design choices for a client's "dream house", or an Army officer planning battlefield tactics, nothing provides the same experience of the world as realtime 3D. Since its inception in 1986, MultiGen-Paradigm, Inc. has maintained a leadership position in providing realtime 3D solutions to the visual simulation community. Today, many of our customers have also invested in GIS and GeoSpatial software. While these software solutions do not focus on realtime 3D visualization, they use much of the same source data for building realtime 3D projects. MultiGen-Paradigm is tying the GIS and Real-Time Visualization worlds together. MultiGen-Paradigm provides a complete solution for the processing, management, analysis and visualization of geo-spatial information in realtime and in 3D. In short, we want to help people see the world as it really is. This white paper explores what we are doing as a company to realize this vision. THE 3D-GIS WORLD TODAY An Expanding Marketplace As is the case in most technology-driven businesses, GIS and 3D are benefiting from plummeting hardware costs and the explosion of graphics processing capabilities. The same GIS and 3D applications that once required workstation capacities now tuck neatly onto the desktop of your PC. Similarly, the costs of high-end graphics hardware, - so crucial to the use of 3D - have dropped into the affordable range. Given the potential for a much bigger market, industry vendors are flooding the marketplace with feature-rich products and capabilities. Plus, there is an unprecedented amount of GIS data being accumulated by vendors, government agencies, data suppliers, and end users, much of it in the public domain. With the addition of new technologies for extrapolating 3D information from 2D data, all the pieces are in place for the rapid expansion of realtime 3D applications. A Marketplace of Many Pieces The 3D-GIS marketplace is a world of many vendors and many products, each competing for a slice of the available business. This competitive environment has led to a vibrant and highly innovative market, with no dominant players and few vertically-integrated product lines. As a result, today's 3D-GIS solutions are almost always multi-product and multi-vendor. However, that leaves the industry with huge issues of product and vendor interoperability. Historically, it is the users who have been left to deal with the problem of creating a whole solution out of somewhat incompatible parts. As a result, users find that their project budgets and lead-times are inflated by the costs of marrying dissimilar datasets, reconciling incompatible formats, and porting the results of one processing program to the next without the benefit of standard interfaces. Moreover, these integration problems up the ante when it comes to providing costly - and scarce - technical support for GIS-related projects. Moving from the Parts to the Whole It seems clear to us that the industry is poised on the edge of an explosive growth in GIS and real time 3D processing. New and innovative features and lower costs are opening up new opportunities for users to expand their use of their GIS applications, and to jump from 2D imaging to 3D visualization. For many projects, the move to realtime 3D visualization provides the key payoff in terms of value and usability for the end user. Yet, in our view, that will not happen until the industry removes the biggest stumbling block to its growth, which is the challenge of bringing together the many pieces in the marketplace into a unified and affordable production environment. Our Commitment to the Marketplace MultiGen-Paradigm is committed to a three-part strategy to remove the incompatibilities and make 3D visual applications more available and more affordable. First, we will continue to improve and expand our existing 3D processing product line with new features and new enhancements that deliver a path to move data from the GIS/GeoSpatial world into the realtime 3D world. We are working with the leading companies in the GIS/GeoSpatial industry including, ESRI, ERDAS, Marconi Integrated Systems and SpaceImaging to develop data interoperability strategies and collaborative projects to foster 3D Visualization. Second, we are making significant investments in developing complete products that will address the issues of product and vendor interoperability head-on. We expect that these products will have an immediate and major impact on the operating environment for GIS users who need the benefits that only 3D can bring. Seamless Integration with PDEï : Professional Database Environment The first of these new products is a unique new technology that we call our Professional Database Environment. PDEï allows the user to build an environment that sits atop and manages a gamut of industry-standard GIS and 3D raw materials - including databases, database engines, industry tools, custom tools, facility-unique capabilities, and source data. PDEï creates a seamless environment in which the user can mix and match source data products from many vendors into a single processing system, with complete interoperability between the products. In effect, each user gets to build their own vertically integrated solution. The output from PDEï is a customized database that can be rendered in 3D using MultiGen-Paradigm, Inc.'s standard products, such as Vega. Professional Database Environment is the first in a new class of products designed to give users the best of both worlds - the productivity advantages of picking and choosing from the best products in the marketplace, and the operating efficiencies and cost savings that come from using a single integrated system. PDE is a revolutionary approach to 3D-GIS processing. Ê Solutions for Vertical Markets Our third strategic initiative addresses the opportunities that exist in vertical markets. Using PDE's methodology allows a partnership to build between the customer and the vendors to address the specific requirements. The result is tailored solutions that deliver the benefits of customized applications and the cost advantages of standard packages. MPI's is currently developing a powerful extension (plug in) to ESRI's ArcView GISŠ in conjunction with The Orton Family Foundation and The Environmental Simulation Center to meet the needs of the urban simulation market. This extension is a derivative of PDE and will be is deployed as an extension to ArcView GISŠ This Realtime 3D extension processes existing GIS layers in ArcView into a correlated realtime 3D scene. The user can then – through an innovative set of runtime tools – add, delete and modify locations of GIS features to test various planning scenarios. (see sidebar for details.) We expect this extension to be a huge hit with any ArcViewŠ user that has never before had access to affordable 3D-GIS products. This project will be the model for bringing these capabilities to vertical markets in a host of industries. SUMMING UP The existing GIS community represents investments of billions of dollars in source data, the benefits of which will not be fully realized until users are able to render them affordably in 3D. We believe that our new products and strategies represent a key first step to unlocking the 3D potential that lies hidden in all those 2D assets. In the process, we expect to bring the benefit of these systems to millions of people who have not yet experienced the power and usefulness of seeing the world as it really is - in realtime and 3D. We look forward to working with all of you to achieve that goal. For more information on our GIS/GeoSpatial strategies, please contact: Jonathan Zucker
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