The Altus Mapping Engine allows you to create maps that would be impossible in other mapping engines. It is built from the ground up on a native core and makes maximum use of the onboard GPU to produce stellar performance. Your products will be able to visualize more than ever before.

Easily maximize your customers' benefit by avoiding the scalability limitations typically experienced with other mapping engines. Add a layer with hundreds of thousands of markers. Add supplemental raster images. Add 3D models. Add layers of polygons and lines, either on the surface or in the air. Add weather layers. Stack layers on top of each other if you like. Altus can handle whatever you need to do.

Hundreds of thousands of pilots trust the Altus Mapping Engine every day for flight planning, navigation, security, situational awareness, and defense scenarios. Your products will enjoy the same stability we bring to the aviation industry.

Altus is natively 3D. You have full control to point the camera straight down to look at a "flat map" or tilt the camera to see your scene from a different perspective. This seamless 2D/3D functionality assists with the comprehension of visual information by smoothly switching context. This is always present in Altus–a switch of modes or data is not required.

Terrain is baked into the mapping engine from the ground up. Your map can be flat, or it can accurately display terrain either with images draped over the terrain or with your own custom terrain color bar.

You no longer have to rely on low resolution, pre-rendered raster images typically used in weather displays. Altus gets closer to the source data model by integrating common formats underlying different products like radar, temperature, precipitation, and wind speed and direction.

We’ve exposed a pattern of high fidelity rendering of weather that enables:

• Higher resolution look and feel
• Faster downloads
• Flexible color display

At runtime, configurable colors and sampling can be used to create a smooth look from high or low resolution data.

The lighting model in Altus helps create an improved level of realism. This includes the rendering of an atmosphere layer and flexible control for the developer so each application can have its own style. The improvements can benefit applications aiming for general or thematic cartography.

Control over the backdrop of Altus can have a big impact on the look and feel of an application. The sky control exposes a way to control a rendered starfield, background color, and background images.

Altus gives developers easy ways to work with both online and offline data, because the data formats are identical. Do you have a set of 200,000 markers? The marker file can be downloaded to the device for offline visibility. Or the file can live on a server and stream in over the Internet to save space on the device. It is also possible to handle situations where the internet connection is intermittent. Raster tiles, vector tiles, terrain, markers and weather can all exist on device or on the server.