Founded in 1996 by four members of the Digital Mapping Laboratory from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, TerraSim employees have a variety of experience in simulation database construction, photogrammetry, image understanding, and cartographic feature extraction. This expertise is used to support customers requiring robust and timely solutions to complex problems.

TerraSim develops and markets TerraTools^®, The Complete Synthetic Environment Toolkit. Various plug-ins and extensions for TerraTools are constantly being researched, developed, and released.

TerraTools automatically transforms raw cartographic and GIS data into complex 3D visualizations suitable for real-time driving or flight simulation. TerraTools provides an easy-to-use interface for its powerful terrain and feature generation tools, enabling users to rapidly construct complex geospecific virtual worlds without tedious manual modeling. In many cases, GIS source data can be freely downloaded from the internet and converted to a realistic 3D environment in a matter of hours. TerraTools supports the integration of custom GIS source data, CAD models, and design and architectural models, producing highly accurate environments for urban, suburban, and natural environments. TerraTools is supported on Windows 2000/XP workstations.

In addition to marketing TerraTools and producing integrated software tools and systems, TerraSim provides a wide variety of database construction services.

TerraSim holds a GSA sales schedule, GS-35F-0143N, covering the purchase of TerraSim software, maintenance, and training. Pricing and GSA Catalog is available on the GSA website. Qualified government agencies and contractors acquiring TerraSim products are encouraged to use our GSA Schedule to simplify procurement and to achieve significant sales discounts.

Since its founding in 1996, TerraSim has established itself as an active member of both the technical community of Western Pennsylvania and of the visualization community worldwide. The following companies and organizations provide TerraSim with access to various segments of the modeling and visual simulation communities.

• Antycip - TerraSim partners with Antycip Simulation as a direct reseller of of TerraTools products and services in Europe. Antycip is leading the European COTS tools market with over 10 years experience in the modeling and simulation industry. Click here for the details of this partnership.
• MÄK Technologies - TerraSim is proud to be a business partner with MAK Technologies. Visit the MÄK partners page for more information regarding our database export capabilities for MÄK VR-Forces and MÄK Stealth.
• VizMAP Pty Ltd - TerraSim partners with VizMAP Pty Ltd as a direct reseller of TerraTools products and professional services.

• ASPRS - TerraSim, Inc. became a sustaining member of ASPRS in 2003 in order to participate in the convergence between new technologies for geospatial data acquisition and the use of 3D visualizations as an analysis tool for emerging civil and defense applications.
• The IMAGE Society, Inc. - IMAGE is a technical non-profit professional association for the advancement of visual simulation, related virtual reality technologies, and their applications.
• NDIA - TerraSim is proud to be a corporate member of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) and its National Training and Simulation Assiciation (NTSA) subsidiary.
• Pittsburgh Technology Council - TerraSim is a corporate member of the Pittsburgh Technology Council.
• SEDRIS - TerraSim has been a SEDRIS associate since 1999 and offers a SEDRIS export plug-in to our TerraTools product.

TerraSim is a US owned small business which actively participates in the Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Over the years, TerraSim has received several highly competitive awards under the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and DARPA SBIR programs. In 2002, TerraSim received a Tibbetts Award for their Phase II SBIR entitled "Computer- Assisted Modeling of Urban Environments." We were the only Pennsylvania-based business to be honored with the award that year.

SBIR funding projects are directed into new TerraSim products, such as DEMTools and RoadMAP, as well as into enhancements to our TerraTools Core and plug-in options.

TerraSim had been awarded SBIR funding under the following topics:

David M. McKeown, Jr. received a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in computer science from Union College, Schenectady, NY in 1972. He has over 25 years of experience in the areas of image understanding for the automated analysis of remotely sensed imagery, digital mapping, image/map database systems, computer graphics, and artifical intelligence. Mr. McKeown has been a principal investigator on research programs in computer vision and rapid construction of virtual world databases for advanced distributed simulation sponsored by the US Army Topographic Engineering Center, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Mapping Agency, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In 1996, he received the Photogrammetric Award (Fairchild) from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing as well as the Schermerhorn Award from the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

J. Chris McGlone received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Kentucky in 1974 and master's and doctorate degrees in civil engineering (photogrammetry) from Purdue University in 1980. For over 20 years, he had been involved with computer vision and image processing systems for photo interpretation. In addition, he worked in camera design, modeling, and photogrammetric and image understanding techniques with applications in automated cartographic feature extraction and general computer vision solutions.

Michael F. Polis received a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. He has over 9 years of experience in the development of algorithms and software for the generation of TINs and integrated TINs, including the CMU FastITIN program and BREP library. He has participated in the planning and generation of ITIN terrain skins used in the STOW-E, Prarie Warrior, and Camp Pendleton exercises.

Jefferey A. Shufelt received a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics(computer science), a master's degree in computer science and a doctorate degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, 1993, and 1996, respectively. He has worked in the areas of cartographic feature detection and extraction for over 9 years, focusing on the application of photogrammetric methods to computer vision tasks for the rapid construction of simulation databases.