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Company Background
| Digital Radiance's unique technology capabilities derive from
research performed by the company's founder, Ron J. Phillips, while working on projects as
diverse as national missile defense and global weather research. While an engineer
with General Research Corp. during the mid-1980s, Ron designed and developed one
of the first Silicon Graphics-based real-time interactive 3D global situation display applications. Ron also designed and developed the core
TCP/IP-based communications capabilities used by numerous national-scale multiprocessor supercomputer-based distributed ballistic missile
defense simulations. While working as a technology researcher at the Army's
Advanced Research Center in the late '80s, Ron caught the 3D animation bug
when he created several 3D computer-generated videos on high-end Silicon Graphics
workstations and multi-processor computers. In the early 1990s at the
Global Hydrology and Climate Center and at NASA Marshall, Mr. Phillips designed and developed
innovative real-time interactive 3D
applications, detailed in the section below, for searching and displaying global-scale multi-source earth science
datasets. Based on these successful experiences and the projected growth in both desktop-based
interactive 3D capabilities and the Internet, Mr. Phillips founded Digital Radiance in
1995 to provide custom interactive 3D software and content development for commercial,
government, museum and scientific clients. Ron holds two patents
related to real-time weather visualization with other patents pending. |
Interactive
Real-time 3D Scientific Visualization Technology
| Many of Digital Radiance's
interactive 3D visualization technologies center on innovative techniques for extracting, merging, and
presenting in real-time the most critical information from multiple sources of 2D and 3D time-varying
data. Detailed at right are samples of interactive 3D earth science applications developed
by Mr. Phillips while working with NASA and University of Alabama in Huntsville
researchers in the early 1990s. These applications culminated in the design and
development of a generalized C++ library, termed the Space-Time Toolkit
by Phillips, for the rapid
development of multi-sensor earth science visualization and analysis applications. This
library provided the following capabilities:
- Real-time 3D visual integration of time-varying data from:
- Multiple satellites (e.g., GOES, AVHRR, SSMI, OTD, LIS) in "raw"
real-time sensor-space
- Airborne sensors (lidar, CCD, point-sampling)
- Ground-based sensors (CONUS lightning network, NWS radars, NEXRAD Doppler radars, GPS
sensors)
- Map data and map imagery in various mapping projections (Cylindrical, Spherical,
Mercator, lat/lon, sensor-space, DTED/DEM)
- Flexible 4D space-time framework with no requirement for pre-sampling the input data to
a common spatial or temporal grid, thus facilitating native access to real-time data or
unprocessed data
- Variable level of "accuracy-versus-interactivity" for quickly searching and
discarding irrelevant data based on the user's 3D activity.
- Interactive 2D and 3D display using either the Toolkit's software renderer or OpenGL for
easy porting to a wide range of computer platforms.
These capabilities, among others, are at the core of Digital Radiance's unique
technologies and provide the basis for the successful development of the leading-edge
commercial, scientific and technical applications for our clients. |
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