Realistic rendering of virtual earth in real-time application

A new approach was proposed to enhance realism of virtual earth in VR-based real-time applications. A virtual earth which had 21600×10800 pixels surface texture, bumping surface and shine of atmosphere was constructed. The whole virtual earth was cut into 128 parts and then the position of vertices, normal vectors, texture coordinate were calculated by geometry. Using the techniques of the mixture of the textures of earth, normal and clouds, it achieved relatively vivid surface of the earth. By moving and scaling the board which had atmosphere texture, it showed the shine of atmosphere. To achieve good real-time, it eliminated the unvisible parts by judging the parts' visibility in real-time, and chose different resolutions of texture. Experiments show that this approach is able to run 45 frames per second with 1.02 GB texture pixels.