a terrain engine for osgEarth

Lately I've been working on an experimental terrain engine for osgEarth on behalf of the folks at Pelican Mapping. osgEarth is a cool project that imports a variety of geographic raster and vector data into Open Scene Graph without requiring a lengthy pre-processing step. I've implemented the algorithm described in Seamless Patches for GPU-Based Terrain Rendering. The main feature of this technique is that LOD is determined at the patch edges, so that the polygons on either side of an edge always line up. The four triangles of a square patch may have different resolutions and are stitched together by a small number of strips. Here's a scene with Mt. Fuji:

And the wire frame view:

Of course, the objective is to get to a whole-earth scheme. I'm going with a projected cube approach, where the basic seamless algorithm is run on the six sides of the cube. I like the Quadrilateralized Spherical Cube which was developed for processing the data from the NASA Cobe satellite. A nice property of the projection is that is equal-area, so that a recursive devision in the cube face space should result in 4 equal-area spherical quads on the earth. It looks pretty:

Here's hoping that the calculation of the projection doesn't become a big bottleneck. Incidently, it was very hard to find the equations describing the projection: I eventually found a nice formulation here. But beware: there's a typo in Equation 3-38. "cos(theta)" should be "cos(phi)."