Virtual Dictionary
Height Mapped Terrain
Height mapped terrain is typically a grid of terrain ?cells? or ?blocks?, each of which corresponds either to a pixel on a greyscale height map bitmap, or to a matrix of points on a one-sided mesh. It is used with varying degrees of precision to create a feel of surface terrain that rises and falls in an almost natural manner, yet still forms the base of a virtual environment.
One of the disadvantages of height mapped terrain is that you cannot fold the terrain over itself ? each horizontal location can have only one point. A second issue is that as you increase the fidelity of the terrain, you exponentially increase the size of the data file generating it. Height maps are by their nature, single files.
See Also: Height Map
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Book Quotes: Avatar rooted in Physical Details

There is a lot packed into this snippet from SnowCrash. In order for any of this height restricting to work, the virtual environment would have to know who you are, and have access to considerable detail about you, including of course, your height information. Otherwise, people would actually have avatars higher than themselves.
Recreating Rolling Terrain

Rolling terrain follows a specific pattern when viewed from the air. Anywhere on Earth, it is easily recognizable by the way it flows as a near never ending series of similar forms. Smooth, rounded ridges interspersed by valleys, leading down to deep valleys at either end.
Creating Realistic Terrain: Grasslands

Creating realistic terrain involves more than simply sculpting out a feature and plonking it on the landscape. To truly create a believable landscape, the process of natural grassland formation has to be understood, else grasslands may be placed in locations they have no place being.
Creating Realistic Terrain: River Systems

Creating realistic terrain involves more than simply sculpting out a feature and plonking it on the landscape. To truly create a believable landscape, the entire process of natural river creation has to be understood, so that rivers can be created that flow naturally and feel right.
Creating Realistic Terrain: Deserts

Creating realistic terrain involves more than simply sculpting out a feature and plonking it on the landscape. To truly create a believable landscape, the process of natural desert formation has to be understood, so that deserts can be created in believable locations.
Mapping Intelligence to the Brain

Intelligence. We understand the concept, and the meaning of this word, but where in the brain, precisely, is intelligence actually located? Until recently, we did not really, have a clue. Now, using perhaps the most common sense approach possible, from neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology have mapped the cognitive zones of the human brain.
Creating Realistic Terrain: Mountains

Creating realistic terrain involves more than simply sculpting out a feature and plonking it on the landscape. To truly create a believable landscape, the process of natural mountain formation has to be understood else Mountain ranges may be formed in places that simply make no sense, or worse, disrupt the sense of locations around them.
Lawnmower Man

Created in 1992 during the height of the first great public VR hype, Lawnmower Man is a little on the hammy side, but is that rarest of rare things: A sci-fi film that has done its homework. Every VR sequence, all the VR hardware is directly based on actual capabilities of the time, and nothing is done that could not be done from a VR and interfacing standpoint.
The VTP was created to assist in the development of the tools and procedures needed to create graphical simulation of more or less anything you could name.
3-D Modeling Advance: A single photo can be reconstructed into a 3-D scene

Building on the premise of Parallax mapping, in which 3D displacement of surfaces is faked by means of displacing textures both by creating a height map of their protuberance from 3D space and then calculating the angle of that protuberance relative to the angle the observer is looking, Microsoft and Make3D have created a process allowing a single photo to become a 3D scene.
Industry
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(27/05/2008)
Taking its inspiration from the grasshopper, a tiny two-legged robot that stores elastic energy in springs has leaped 27 times its own height, smashing the record of 17 times set by a previous robot.
Developed by researchers ...
(21/09/2004)
Well, alright, so they don't replicate. The robots created by Zack Butler and colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US only exist virtually, thou each is identical to every other, and are capable of combining and separating as ...
(26/02/2009)
New footage of the BigDog packbot and its continued development has been released by the US Army. BigDog is a 340 lb, four legged robot designed to traverse any terrain - grass, rocks, slopes, sand, snow, running water, et al. It is also ca...
(08/01/2007)
Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have recently built what they call an odour recorder, capable of recording the molecules that make up smells and storing them so they can be copied and reassembled later.
Given t...
(11/08/2008)
A six-legged autonomous robotic spider jointly developed by Nanyang Polytechnic of Singapore, Schmid Engineering AG and Analog Devices has been designed to support rescue operations.
The robot's highly mobile walking scheme ...