Distributed Virtual Environment For Ship Navigation

The Virtual Reality(VR) technology and Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) have varieties of applications in the maritime field, such as ship design, ship's performance analysis, digital harbor and shiphandling simulator for the crew training, etc. In this thesis I'll first analysis the current states of VR research and the basic concept and applications of DVE, then discuss the key technologies for applying DVE to ship navigation system.This thesis firstly designed distributed real-time database using the dynamic and static parameters' information of the ships, then, constructed three dimension ships and harbor model files which can be downloaded to the clients' IE browsers through internet by employing VR technology. We applied the External Authoring Interface(EAI) of VRML and Java to refresh the three dimension scene and change the viewpoints in the scene, and used JDBC database interface to operate the data in the distributed real-time database, obtained and displayed the dynamic information and static parameters in real-time. The system can also displayed the location of the ship on the ECDIS. The whole system was programmed by VRML and Java which made it possible to transplant to other platforms. The distributed environment navigation system combined the text information, two dimension information and three dimension information together, and can be used in the ship navigation, querying of the ship parameters and status, distributed teaching and the lifesaving in the emergency.