Shaping the team and the mission

The team

In 1999, we had a team going with solid knowledge about radio network planning, radio network planning tools, general programming and - incidentally - an edge on writing 3D software engines.

A window of opportunity

In 1999 3D graphics processors started to be become available to desktop users, mainly driven by nVidias GeForce chip series.

Defining the mission

In 1999-2000, there was a lot hype around the development of the new 3G radio networks. We thought we'd be able to contribute with our combined knowledge of radio network planning, mapping data for radio planning and 3D software. Especially combined with the fact that the chips were starting to be common.

Evaluating the mission

By June 2000, we had created a quite simple and straight-forward demonstration of a 3D engine and showed it to some potential customers. There was a lot of enthusiasm. It was substantially faster than anyting else on the market.

Taking it to the shows

Preparations

We booked a stand at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes for January 2001 and very ambitiously started developing a 3D visualization tool with an associated data server based on Orion.

The first trade show

We took the trip to Cannes and showed the software to the audience. Brought a dual processor (2x1 GHz) demo PC with a state of the art graphics card from nVidia. The reception was mixed.

Positive comments:

• Increadibly fast!
• We'd like to replace our entire GUI with your engine. Is that possible?

Negative comments

• We do not have that powerful PC's.

Further development

We took lessons from the 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004 shows in Cannes, as well as shows in Las Vegas and in Sweden and continued the development. In parallell we also had other projects to attend to, so the Terracopter effort has to stand back at times. In parallell the telecomminications market took a steep downturn in 2001-2003, so we did not experience the best of markets.

Anyway the development continued. We went through three major different versions of the 3D engine - each one with different approaches and added lots of non-related features such as API support etc.

Creating Terracopter

Early 2004 we decided to make a clean and straight-forward 3D viewer that would make it possible to make general purpose use of our engine and to supply that engine as free software. The result is what you can download and experience on this site.

We hope you enjoy Terracopter!

The future

We currently have no definete plans regarding further development. Development could kick off again if we stumble on a commercial opportunity, but we are not actively pursuing business related to Terracopter. We have other products that consume our development resources and an opportunity to further develop Terracopter will basically have to fall on our lap. Having said that we might continue previous efforts to integrate the engine with our other products without further notice. Please get in touch with is should you want to explore using Terracopter as part of your business. Outright purchases of the source code and knowledge transfer is on the table.