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NASA Releases World Viewer
Klatoo55 writes "Nasa has released a comprehensive world viewing tool that allows you to zoom from planetary resolution down to where you can pick out individual streets. Really cool, but it needs a good internet connection and a decent graphics card. There's all sorts of interesting features, such as the ability to tilt your view for a flight-sim like experience and a data display feature that shows current natural disasters, political boundaries, weather patterns, and landmarks on the Earth's surface, all while providing a dynamic satellite's eye view of the planet."
I've been watching the weather and all sorts of neat stuff on the NOAA GEOS site for years. Not great for spying on your city, but great animations for tracking weather and hurricanes
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Recommended Specifications * Windows 2000, XP Home, or XP Professional * Intel Pentium 3 1 ghz or AMD Athlon or higher * 256 MB of RAM * 3D Graphics Card o nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra o ATI Radeon 7500 o Intel Extreme Graphics 2 * DSL / Cable connection or faster * 2 GB of disk space The requirements are a bit high, but the demo pictures they show are quite impressive. It does appear to be opensource, wonder how long it'll be before someone makes a Linux port, and ties to a newsfeed! Trouble in the Middle East? Lets take a look!
Never confuse volume with power.
I had a subscription to Keyhole World Viewer for a while, it's the same type of thing with a shnazzy interface and features. You can download it for a free trial at their site, I haven't tried the NASA one so I don't know how it compares.
~Berj
Pretty cool stuff. The developer says the core will compile on Mono, but obviously there isn't DX for Mono.
Maybe someone can think about a Manged-DX style wrapper around OpenGL for the Mono Project.
Can't think it would be easy though. DX does a lot for you.
The source is supposed to be placed on SourceForge soon. Should be a fun project to hack on.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Here is a commercial site but you can use it for free with watermarks. You can zoom to a persons house. All you need to type in the address of the place. Pretty nice, check it out. Only problem is that some of the images are a couple years old... but then how often do streets and house move/change physcially?
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Try this link, it seems to work:/ features.html
http://learn.arc.nasa.gov.nyud.net:8090/worldwind
you can still download the program from here
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
http://freecache.org/http://opensource.arc.nasa.go v/archives/worldwind-1_2.zip
Also cached of course.
For those of you who like this sort of software, check out Celestia. It is a 3D space simulator, and lets you visit objects in our solar system and a bunch of stars. It's really amazing, and it's open source! My sister uses it for teaching astronomy to the neighborhood kids in their home-schooling class.
I was thinking of Celestia too, but more specifically, I was thinking that, as we speak, someone will be busy downloading and putting together new even higher detail virtual texture sets.
Celestia allowed you to zoom to remarkable detail, but was limited by the amount of freely available data - the BluMarble NASA image of the earth was about the best there was. This will provide the opportunity to go to those extra levels of detail - I look forward to the results for Celestia.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I can't believe no one's mentioned terraserver (http://terraserver.microsoft.com/) yet. Sure, it only covers the U.S. and is a microsoft sponsored site (in conjunction w/ the USGS), but it's totally free, and has detailed images of (almost) the entire country.
Nope, The terraserver is USGS aerial photography. This, however is GOES satellite data. Pretty cool, IMHO. I was on the Terraserver planning my trip last week to Centralia, Pennsylvania. Has had a coal fire burning underneath it for 40 years. Look at the street grids with no houses on them. And if you scroll 100 meters south of downtown, there's a giant steaming crater. It's a fun place. I'd love to fly through Centralia on this Nasa thing. Anybody know what the resolution is? I doubt it would be better than 1 meter...
Keyhole makes a tool that has more detail than this, although they only have data for urban centers.
All in all, it makes for one hell of a big "Hello World" program...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Actually, Terraserver is finally updating their up-to-a-decade-old black and white satellite photos of the entire United States (and Canada and Mexico). They're updating them with color photos from 2002, but they haven't done a lot of the major cities. My guess is - fear of security. For example, some of the buildings in the Washington, D.C. photos are blurred. I don't think it really makes a difference to security though. People who want to cause harm don't need satellite images.
Also...SpaceImaging.com's good - they have lots of famous places in their gallery, as well as a bunch of universities.
Put it on http://SuprNova.org If its not up by the time I get it downloaded, I'll put it up myself.
Sorry but a slashdoting of a 250MB file is just just a bit more than we had planned for. The software you are looking for is quite exceptional. We suggest you bookmark it and come back latter when the flood is finished.
from http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/archives/worldwind- 1_2.zip
We are sorry but the slashdoting of a 250MB file was a bit more than we had planned for. We will re-post this file later in the day or this evening once the initial rush cools off. Thank you for your patience.
Very useful for spying on old images of neighbors.
It can be viewed at The National Map.
don't forget about the jpl image archive. they have some nice shots of most planets (in our solar system at least), including earth.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
I worked at NASA last semester. Judging by the URL, this isn't NASA's main cluster of servers (note that nasa.gov loads briskly). This is probably just some SGI in a server closet in whatever building this was made in at Ames.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Until NASA's servers manage to recover from the demand, here's a Torrent for your downloading enjoyment.
Good thing you can't get that information anywhere else or there'd be real trouble. Interestingly enough, the 2002 version has been covered over somewhat. So perhaps this is just a post-9/11 scare.
http://centraldownload.mine.nu/download.php?id=110 6&hit=1&file=worldwind.torrent Here is the torrent. It is slow to start but is getting faster with more people.
Toronto has a GIS/Map feature on their web site, which includes Satellite maps (you need to zoom in first, then it will appear). The maps are from 2002, iirc.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
yes
its a public torrent, a little poky right now.
Check out Keyhole LT
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
FYI ... This is from their webpage:
:
2 .z ip1 _2.z ipz ip1 _2.z ip
We are online again the WorldWind application can be downloaded from the following mirrors:
BEST
http://128.102.102.126:9080/mirror/worldwind-1_
http://128.102.102.129:9080/mirror/worldwind-
http://kiosk.arc.nasa.gov:8090/worldwind-1_2.
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/archivetmps/worldwind-
http://qtss.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind-1_2.zip is working at about 175k for me...
There seem to be two torrents currently online: http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2658/worldwi nd.torrent
http://www.planettrevor.net/worldwind-1_2.zip.torr ent
Just go to Suprnova.org and look for the torrent file. That is how I managed to get WorldWind downloaded. Why does anyone bother with centrally configured downloads of large files? Set up a tracker and make the torrent file available and you get scalable download capability that increases as the demand gets larger.
I am a subscriber to Keyhole which is a much more powerful and accessible product. But to be fair it is not free. If you are intrigued by World Wind and would like to have a look at the real thing you can get a 7 day or 14 day trial. The longer trial and lower subscription price are for the NVidia version of Keyhole which is subsidized by NVidia (I suppose). Please note though that an NVidia graphics board is not a necessity. The current first year subscription for the NVidia version is $30.
I don't work for Keyhole but as someone else commented I wouldn't mind. For example, would they like to produce a Mac version of the product?