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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.
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...
http://freecache.org/http://opensource.arc.nasa.go v/archives/worldwind-1_2.zip
Also cached of course.
They have a huge amount of data in varried resolution. Most of it is available from multiple sources for free; however they have it all in one spot and all converted for their program.
What makes it truly great is the ability to add your own overlays directly over top of its data. Quite a spectacular product.
If you have it give this a try take a image of vegitaion [A] and overlay it over Iraq with at 30% transparency. Add a overlay that with the sunni / sheite population densities [B] and do the same.
KaPow! Data in context. Quite amazing really.
[A] vegetation will require some cutting and pasting... but the images you have w/ key hole are pretty good
[B] Religious groups
If you want to check them out they are here:
earthviewer
[ I dont' work for them, but I would ;) ]
Until NASA's servers manage to recover from the demand, here's a Torrent for your downloading enjoyment.
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.
http://centraldownload.mine.nu/download.php?id=110 6&hit=1&file=worldwind.torrent
(I didn't make the torrent, but I did post the link. ;-)