3D fly-through of Grand Canyon

There are a great set of demos of the Minerva software application, including a 3D fly-through of the Grand Canyon, that's nicely done.

Adam Kubach at Univ. of Texas briefed us this afternoon on Minerva during the iPlant GIS advisory meeting at the UA.

Minerva is an open-source program for viewing geospatial data that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It unifies standard GIS capabilities with high-performance, 3D visualization.

Minerva's primary strength is the ability to display raster and vector data together from multiple sources at interactive speeds. It can easily display large terrain and image repositories because it automatically draws the appropriate level of detail.

Minerva was started as a project at the Fulton High Performance Computing Initiative at Arizona State University. Minerva has seen heavy use at the Decision Theater, the production visualization facility at ASU. Projects completed with Minerva vary from school enrollment and disease propagation to real-time weather prediction.

There's also a simulation showing the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport with the groundprint of sound from planes taking off. And take a look at the Mars and Moon clips.

Minerva -- Grand Canyon Tour from Perry Miller on Vimeo.