Interactive visualization of the Earth surface means depicting of the globe in 3D at different viewing angles and from different distances to the viewer. This term typically implies that the level of detail of the Earth surface stays high even if viewed from closer distance. Such a detailed depicting of the Earth is impossible without a very big dataset from the Earth surface. The problem is that this data, due to its size, does not fit entirely into graphics memory. Therefore, a special level of detail technique like clipmaps, virtual texture or (if it is about terrain) geometry clipmaps must be applied in order to make rendering of this data in realtime possible. This thesis is devoted to implementation of such a technique. In course of the work especially the modern features of OpenGL 4.2 like hardware tessellation with the respect to this problem are tested.
Besides, a new approach originated in course of working at this thesis is introduced. It enables to make vertex meshes which are used for terrains especially fine.
