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• Altus Mapping Engine^™

1 Raster Tiles

Raster tiles are the work-horse of many of today’s mapping applications. The Altus Mapping Engine can render raster tiles faster and more fluidly than any other mapping system. It supports data from any tile source, including your own. Raster tiles can be served from online sources, or they can be downloaded, cached, and viewed offline. Tiles can be in a variety of common image formats or you can have Altus render your own format using the Altus tile provider API.

2 Animated Raster Tiles

Not only that, Altus can animate raster layers with a variety of animation techniques that you can control including frame rate, frame count, and inter-frame fading. It can composite animated layers over other layers allowing for many complex visualizations.

4 Vector Maps

Altus is the first platform to offer real-time high-speed rendering of large GIS vector data sources. This includes Open Street Map, Natural Earth, ESRI shape files, and your own custom vector data.

A comprehensive back-end tool chain allows the extraction and processing of road, highway, land, and point of interest data from almost any GIS data source. Large vector data sets can be distilled into very compact files so maps fit on the device and work offline. In fact, the entire planet Earth with all political boundaries, land-masses, and water bodies can be rendered with an Altus vector map file that is as small as 20 MB.

And because the data are never rasterized, it can be re-styled on the fly, without the need for large sets of raster tiles, or expensive server infrastructure. This also allows complex data visualization and animation scenarios with a minimal amount of overhead.

Vector Showcase

6 Terrain & Oceans

Altus provides a fully customizable terrain and ocean rendering system. Large terrain data sets as well a vector water and coastline data may be used to create accurate, dynamically shaded, terrain and water layers. Raw data can be converted into portable onboard formats that work offline in a variety of resolutions depending on your users needs. A programmable height color bar controls the styling of terrain and water data, and because the data are dynamically drawn, it may be restyled instantly at any time. This allows you to define your own world-wide look-and-feel or to recolor terrain dynamically based on altitude. In addition, any other map layer can be overlaid or dynamically blended with terrain and ocean layers to create sophisticated composite maps.

7 Markers

Altus has the most scalable and sophisticated geographic marker system available. Altus supports custom drawn or pre-rendered marker images. Marker layers may be static or dynamic, generated on the fly, or pre-generated offline and downloaded to the device.

Geographic location, anchor, rotation, and heading for each marker can be configured. Rotation can be screen-aligned so that a marker is always readable, especially useful for text, or markers may be true-north aligned so their respective rotation looks correct as the user pans and zooms. In addition, dynamic clustering is supported and each marker can be weighted based on its priority or importance. This allows you to put thousands of markers in close proximity and then direct the Altus mapping engine to dynamically fade them in and out based on relevance. Marker images can take the form of simple icons, or complex user interface components with hit-testable areas that act like buttons. Marker images can be pre-cached or loaded on the fly. Altus supports clustered dynamic LOD of marker layers with millions of markers, and it renders them while maintaining fluid user interaction.

8 Animated Markers

Altus offers dynamic marker layers. In a dynamic marker layer, a geographic marker can be programmatically repositioned or rotated at any time. This can be an instantaneous change, or it can be animated. Animated markers combined with animated vector circles allow you to provide powerful own-ship indicators or to track multiple moving targets on any map.

9 Animated Virtual Camera

Altus provides a powerful touch interface and virtual camera system. Panning, zooming, and tapping gestures provide a fluid user experience and are easy to customize. In addition, you can also seamlessly transition from the traditional north-up view to track-up or track forward modes. In these modes, heading determines map rotation giving users a more realistic depiction of the area they are in. Track-up forward fills more of the viewing area with the content that is along the existing heading. Track-up camera modes, combined with vector maps and dynamic marker layers, present an accurate and readable depiction based on current heading. And because these modes and transitions in and out of the modes are fully animated, the experience is seamless to the user.