Driving the HUD from the flight sim or recreating the HUD

[wijoon]

Hi,

I'm working on a project plotting multiple aircraft in GE from ADS-B telemetry received from our aircraft. I've got the plotting of other aircraft in GE pretty much complete.  This project is for situational awareness for UAV flights.  I'm using matlab to continuously modify KML scripts and then refresh them.

Right now I have 4 different views to view other aircraft: a bird’s eye view with our UAV at the center, a chase view, a manual mode and a cockpit mode.  The cockpit mode is where I am struggling.  I would like to have a similar display as the HUD on the flight simulator so that we can display our data from our aircraft.  We receive speed, altitude and heading.  We don't have any way of receiving pitch or bank angle without interpolating it from lat/long or alt.

I've searched through the forums and other places to see if it is possible to drive the flight simulator through KML codes.  From what I've read, no one has had any luck.  Has anyone recently found a way of doing this?

Since that does not work.  My next course of action is to develop my own HUD. I've seen some ideas out there that show steam gauges and just rotate screen overlays to display data.  I think these take up too much real estate on the screen and may block portions of the screen.  We want to see other aircraft and it wouldn't make sense if half the screen is taken up by steam gauges. 

My idea is to use screen overlays to display the data by moving them up or down (speed and altitude) or right or left (heading).  For instance for altitude I would use a long image and move it up or down relative to another image that stays in the same spot and acts as a pointer.  Does anyone know if there is any more functionality built into <screenoverlay> than what is listed in the reference guide?  It would be helpful if I could only show a portion of the image at a time instead of the entire altitude array.  For instance, instead of displaying the entire image for the altitude range, maybe only display 300 feet above and 300 feet below the actual altitude.

Does anyone have any ideas, suggestions or places to read more information?  I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism or advice.  If I’m unclear on anything or I missed some post that has a solution please let me know.

Bill

[wijoon]

Quick edit, I wasn't sure if this was the appropriate forum to place this post in.  I thought it might be because I am running developing all the code using matlab.

[KoflAIR]

A very advanced use of the GE Plugin you can find in the recent
article of the google earth blog.
Check this out: http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2011/07/explosions_in_google_earth.html
Maybe the way the developers display graphical text in the demo would
also be a fitting solution for your requirements.

[wijoon]

Thanks that is an interesting site and I will have to read some of his other projects, but this confirmed my fear for displaying data.  Was hoping I wouldn't have to use bitmaps/textures for data.

Also I've figured out the HUD thing, it's not nearly as nice as the built in flight sim one but it works.  I just have the pointer remain stationary and the altitude, speed, and compass scales move relative to pointers.