Simple OpenGL Viewer

DTM data for the United Kingdom is often divided into 20km by 20km tiles of varying levels of detail. The data provided had measurement points every 50m. A simple calculation demonstrates that there are 160,801 points per tile.

The figure below shows the area the tile covers.

Bournemouth and Poole area covered by photograph.

The DTM data viewer was constructed using C++ and OpenGL. The code effectively loads and parses the data and stores it in computer memory. OpenGL provides the graphical user interface that allows the user to toggle the display of the points and mesh grid. It also has a set of camera functions to zoom, pan and rotate the scene.

The media clip below shows the simple DTM data viewer. The clip starts with the data points and then shows the grid and camera movements.