Although the generation of a visibility grid corresponding to the elevation data for an area of interest provides the basis for extracting concise information for a variety of siting algorithms, it also offers the opportunity to provide a display to augment existing ways of visually representing terrain considerations for planners and decision makers. Many users of digital terrain data who could provide useful insights into various methods of rendering a visibility image may not have access workstation environments common in research and academic settings.
In an attempt to make some form of visibility display available to users with relatively restricted computing resources, a standalone demonstration system was developed whose primary screen display is shown in Figure 11. It can execute on any Intel 80x86 architecture running an MS-DOS or compatible operating system with a standard VGA (640x480x16 color) display. The entire demonstration package is distributed on a single 1.2MB 5.25 inch floppy disk, which can hold the demonstration program, background and operating information text, and elevation and visibility data for 12 areas corresponding to one-degree DTED Level I cells. Also provided for each area are lists of the 16 best and 64 best visible points, as selected from the entire cell and as selected from within 16 equal sub regions with a cell to reduce clustering.
This demo has been quite well received.