The Uniview HALO Surfaces, used to represent planets, adds support for planetary surfaces of arbitrarily high resolution. Using an imple- mentation of the ROAM2 technique, originally developed by Mark Duchaineau at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Uniview is able to dynamically stream height mapped geometry and texture maps into the planet rendering engine.

HALO surfaces are processed through a pre-processing application that reformats textures of any size into a hierarchical and more optimized format for use within Uniview. A threaded loader that automatically finds out where your point of interest is on the planet's surface is used to page in the data needed, and a highly optimized renderer that downloads only new vertices to your graphics processor, and maintains vertices visible between frames, is used for drawing.

The HALO Surfaces provide recognition of familiar sites on the surface of Earth, and facilitate the visualization of extreme high resolution databases of the Earth and other planets. This allows you to fly up close to for example Earth and see the mountains and valleys of our planet's surface.