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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."
This is cool. I can see my house! Now if my neighbor had been sunbathing at the time...
I ran to check out the sit and it is Cooooool, but Nasa's gonna have an astronimical bandwith bill today :)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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
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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!
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There's no Linux or Mac version. This means I'll actually have to pull the damn windows box out of the closet I stashed it in.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
"YOU ARE HERE."
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that's just cool.
~dijjnn
I can finally see the world outside of my Mother's basement!!!!
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
...since it's a 259 MB download.
What a perfect (and missed) opportunity for NASA to use BitTorrent instead of a huge zip file. Ah well.
The Army reading list
I wonder if NASA made a version of this for the NSA with ummmm a bit higher resolution.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Will we be able to zoom in on the smoking ruins of the slashdotted webserver? :)
Really cool, but it needs a good internet connection
Are you talking about me or their server?
Sorry I don't believe you really work at homeland security and are first posting. But your other comments seem possible to me.
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
The power to view a planet is insignificant next to the power of a slashdotting.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Now you can play "enemy of the state" at home, without having to retask satellites on your own.
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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.
If the version released for the public itself is that comprehensive, think of the view of the big brother out there.
Hope my thick black hair and beard'd consume all the light rays and reflect nothing.
It currently only works with ONE planet!
Everything is a threat to national security. There are a half dozen other free websites that offer nearly the same services as this one. Soon, the EU will have its own version of GPS which can be accessed by the public. If someone really wants to kill others, they will find a way regardless. Has anyone noticed that most security implementations after the attacks tend to make people feel safer without making them truly safer? No security is better than a false sense of security; at least people would be on their toes instead of walking around oblivious.
Due to the latency with which the images are updated, this can pose some awkward situations. Imagine a geek looking at their neighborhood, noticing a beautiful nude sunbather next door. Geek runs outside to peek through a knot-hole in the fence to discover that the sunbather has aged 50 years since the last time that the picture was updated...ewww.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
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...
For a high-res view but user-interface nightmare, GlobeXplorer has free and subscription imagery online that incorporates aerial photography for less than 1 meter resolution (like way zoomed in.)
Of course, what roxorz is that the NASA prog is free. At least for now!
--
carbolic
WiFi-toys
Hope someone would integrate this in to Celestia or the other way around. Explore the deepest corners of the galaxy and be in your neighbourhood in a splitsecond.. Nice..
Rapid Nirvana
You really think there's anything secret in Area 51? The whole planet knows where it is.... hardly the best place to keep secrets.
Area 52, on the other hand...
you can still download the program from here
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
I wonder what engine the builder used to design that world? It's pretty fantastic! And the level design, simply AMAZING!
Any GIS type application is considered a threat to our national security. If you take a look at these aerial views of DC you can see how the federal government had the overhead views of the whitehouse and the capitol removed (or blocked). The last thing the government wants is to be responsible for a terrorist act. They feel that tools like this are useful to the general public, so they make them available. At the same time, they can see the emminent threat, so they limit its capabilities.
The elk hunt starts in 2 1/2 weeks, I look forward to the day I can bring my laptop and use a live feed to track the elk herd... :}
I know, I know, it will never happen, but a guy can dream.
Maybe this is a good problem for an aerial kite camera solution
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Am I the only one who sees a Stephenson's Snow Crash reference in this?
Why is it so slow if the program is a C#/.NET Win app that uses DirectX? Surely no one on Slashdot is using that configuration. We're all Linux or BSD and OpenGL, right? ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Actually, the government erected huge white platforms above parts of the city to obscure the stuff that satellites were seeing. It blocked out the sun and all the plants died. They realized it was a bad idea, took the platforms down, and just used Paintbrush to erase the parts they didn't like.
http://freecache.org/http://opensource.arc.nasa.go v/archives/worldwind-1_2.zip
Also cached of course.
uhh, ok so they give u access to this shit but i cant fricken zoom down on area 51, all it is is desert, kinda ripoff that i cant see secret government installations.
Only problem is that some of the images are a couple years old... but then how often do streets and house move/change physcially?
I live in a mobile home, YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
We just slashdotted the World.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
If Kerry would Abolish NASA, I would vote for him.
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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...
Tom: "Terrorists could use this to pinpoint places to strike." Powell: "Tom, I have a Hammond Street Guide to Washington D.C. in my back seat that they could use for that. Let's be realis..." Tom: "George, Dick, how in the hell did he get out of the basement? Agents Smith and Johnson, please escort Mr. Powell back to his cell. And get the CEO of Hammond on the phone." News Reporter: "Quickie Marts all over the country were raided by the FBI today in a massive crackdown on the selling of maps. Store clerks were rounded up and shipped to Guantanamo to possibly face charges of providing material aid to terrorists...or was that tourists. Either way, if they're ever actually charged, I'm sure the secret tribunal will execute justice...or was that Lady Justice...to the fullest extent possible."
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Keyhole makes a tool that has more detail than this, although they only have data for urban centers.
No, I can only find Area 51A.
"If you take a look at these aerial views of DC you can see how the federal government had the overhead views of the whitehouse and the capitol removed (or blocked)"
When the MI5 building was used in a Bond film, someone mentioned that MI5 were worried about the security implications.
To quote: "they feared that filming might reveal the location of one of London's most distinctive landmarks"
It seems obvious that removing the White House from maps is good for security - after all, if nobody knows it's there, they can't attack it?
To anyone who managed to get the program before the site was slashdotted, could you take a look at North Korea along the Chinese border? Is the crater from the "mushroom cloud" explosion visible?
Well, if you take a look at the maps you'll see that they removed a significant portion of the national mall to cover up the area that the whitehouse takes up. They definitely exceeded the boundries of the whitehouse grounds by a few hundred (or maybe thousand) feet.
If you were planning some kind of ground based attack you really wouldn't get any use from the map provided in the link above. Sure you'd get a general picture of where the whitehouse is located (its one of the white blobs for those who don't know), but you certainly couldn't make any plans for storming the grounds.
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.
I would have thought n.a.s.a was bigger than anything slashdotter's could dish out. impressed!
Very useful for spying on old images of neighbors.
It can be viewed at The National Map.
If you are expecting something here, I don't know what to tell you...
So this is what you get when you put a bunch of rocket scientists together and tell them to write a "Hello, World?" app?
-JT
ed2k://|file|worldwind-1_2.zip|265444979|ed5ca6a72 890de497be2185c2007e31e|/
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If one is interested in a global viewer with additional scientific value, the Global Land Cover Facility has the Earth Science Data Interface that allows one to browse Earth's surface from the perspective of many different satellites. It has imagery from the Landsats, Terra, Aqua and the Space Shuttle. For a true-color global satellite imagery set, check out the GeoCover NaturalVue at Earth Satellite Corproation.
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.
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.
Better lay off the downloads for a while guys.
A Dog isn't just for Xmas. With luck there will be some left over for Boxing day as well.
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...
Its not 260 MB, but 2000 GB+ mapdata. It downloads new map parts on the fly while browsing, and in the few hours i used it i have now already more than 500MB in my cache folder...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Perhaps it is also interesting that there is a similar program but with less maps for Windows, Linux and MacOS on http://www.earth3d.org. It is available under the GPL.
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
The problem is that 90% of the people with broadband have asynchronous connections, so there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone what they want. You're probably getting an average of 2-4 KBps from everyone you're downloading from, which doesn't add up to a whole lot for most swarms. P2p will take over once everyone has a synchronous connection. I can't wait until Verizon starts selling FTTP here in Tampa: 15 MBps synchronous for $55 a month :)