Efficient Simulation of Ocean and Land Scene Based on Digital Earth

The efficient and realistic simulation of ocean and land scenes is one of the hotspot and difficult problems of computer graphic. Most simulation of the recent ocean and land scenes is based on plane and is in a limited region. They didn´t consider the factors of earth curvature, nor the edge between ocean and land, can´t be used on digital earth. In this paper, a new method of GPU-based simulation of large-scope ocean and land scenes is presented. It not only considers the factor of earth curvature, but also the edge between ocean and land, can be used on digital earth. First, ocean wave model considering sphere curvature is presented. Then, the visible part of the ocean surface is sampled with screen-subdivision algorithm. Finally, the cost computation of vertexes and color of ocean wave are performed by the programmability of the modern GPU. Results show that the method is efficient and users can fly over ocean and land surface of digital globe in interactive rates on common PC graphics hardware.