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NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer
Bull_UK writes "As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities to the upcoming Java version of World Wind, leaving 1.4 effectively orphaned, but the Open Source community came together and with a lot of hard work we were able to finish what Chris Maxwell started. Some of the new things which differentiate the new World Wind from the competition are the amazing new visual effects, including HDR, check out the video for some examples. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research."
The data I had for hostip.info was 1-pixel-per-kilometre. This new data is twice that resolution, and if I combine this new data with the soon-to-be-open-source 3d engine in Flash, I think it'd be really cool. Geolocate yourself or anyone else by their IP, then zoom around that location in 3d
Sounds like a fun thing to put together - maybe this weekend for the 2D stuff, and as soon as the 3D engine is open-source, I'll include that
As always with this sort of thing, it's getting hold of the data that's the hard part - kudos to those giving it away free to research, education, and me
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
How long before we get a real time world generated for a game like GTA, that uses maps like this to allow you to literaly travel all around the world?
:P
This sort of stuff is so amazing to me, never before has mankind had the ability to get maps of areas with this much detail in such vast areas. I really wonder what past generations would think.
But, I still want to play GTA and rampage my own neiborhood.
It's a serious bummer when the download page only has a windows executable.
Is there a Mac of Linux version available or are we left out in the cold?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
"Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research.""
Does it come with a free broadband connection.
I noticed that the kinds of infographic abilities shown here: http://www.dynagis.net/gallery_screenshots/ are now free, as the plugin that provides them is now CC licensed. (more info here: http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Add-on:DYNAGI S_Golden_Pearl)
THAT is pretty cool, actually. As someone often called on to do design tasks that straddle the line between infographic and visualization, I think I need to give WW another look. I never really considered it once Google Earth came out, because Google Earth was easier for whatever globehopping question I had. But being able to quickly do this kind of visualization ("uh, hey -- we need a picture of the population density of South Dakota, matching our company's color scheme, by tomorrow") should make my life a little easier.
At the bottom of the
So NASA is finishing off the World War? I thought NASA was into space and not time travel.
Wait for World Wind 3.1 and you will suffer much fewer blue planets of death.
It competes with World of Warcraft, except you have space shuttles, global warming and jealous astronauts.
Why did you comment at all? Clearly you did not even read the summary, let alone the article.
Give up now.
I am amazed by your post, the depth of its shallowness is nearly unfathomable.
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
(as apposed to the submitters Wiki - not that I'm ungrateful for his contributions and bringing this news to my attention)
"As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities.."
ITS, ITS, ITS, ITS, ITS, REPEAT AGAIN, is the genitive of "it"!!! How many times do we need to shove this up your throat, you concentration deficient clod?!
*sigh*
Wouldn't be much of a professor if he didn't ask you to look things up. Anyway wasn't Mono suppose to solve problems like this?
am I missing something or the video references is really lacking a link?
The windows version (.net 2.0) is primarily being supported by the open source community since the funding and direction for the NASA World Wind team is towards the Java version.
the community does welcome anyone that wants to come in and help at working the code, DX developers would help a lot to get some of the features hammered out more smoothly.
The Planets Suite is really good, so why does the video have such a bad recording? I can't tell who put it together, but I know there are better recordings of Jupiter availible on the web for free, legally. Why did they have to use a recording that sounds like a middle school orchestra?
The program license
No ... have fun with that windosers.
That's obvious - because GE's goals include things like stability and performance - two things WorldWind noticeably lacks. (Not to mention the horror that is WorldWind's UI.)
I just tried V1.4 - and it has the same braindead UI problems that previous versions have suffered. When you grab a point on the globe - you start the globe spinning, rather than as in GE grabbing a 'handle' to position the map. (And as the rotation speed speed of the globe varies with lag - it's frustrating to position precisely.) When you zoom in - WW loads each and every layer of zoom between the one you start with and where you end up. (This slows rendering (which is glacial to start with) and makes it difficult to reach a precise zoom point and take a goodly amount of time if you change zoom by any significant amount.) Etc... Etc...
This isn't something for the F/OSS community to be proud of. It was a piece of crap when they took it over - and it's still a piece of crap.
Get a clue.
Are they making totally new frameworks for this, or are they using an existing open source framework like Geotools?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
After downloading 25MB (16 for the WorlWind app & 9 for .NET2.0) and installing the .Net 2.0 package I choked on the MS Genuine Windows Validation requirement to download another 9MB of DirectX 9.0.
I went to Firefox to get away from MS security holes, now I get to punch holes in my protection just to play with a Big Blue Marble?
No way. Yes, I have my Windows COA. I just have totally no faith left for MS.
I'm a NWW enthusiast, even if I never really used it on a regular basis... (I'm waiting for the Java version... I hope I won't be deceived).
NASA World Wind sadly never had the media coverage GE had. This is kind of sad. People seems to forget, or ignore, that you can't use Google Earth in a work environment. Well, more precisely, you can't legally install the free version Google Earth in any work environment, not even the Plus version (20$US), you need the Pro (400$US) or the Enterprise version. Why am I underlining this? Because I believe this should have helped NASA World Wind to capture mind share. Should, because not a lot of people care about that fact and Google will not enforce this, since they benefit from the number of people using it, a little like Microsoft did not care about Windows being copied some centuries ago. Oh, this change in the license came with version 4 of the GE beta, launched last summer.
Here's the interesting Google Earth vs NASA World Wind comparison, on the WW Central website.
Animoog.org
Can't see high resolution imagery in NASA World Wind? Well, you can with this great plugin. It allows you to use Microsoft Virtual Earth high rez imagery directly in NASA World Wind. If you wonder, yes, Microsoft agreed to this.
Animoog.org
Ask, and yea shal receive.
Dear lord. I know this is slashdot and all, but that has got to be one of the worst written summaries I've ever laid my eyes on. Is it that hard to understand what a run-on sentence is?
Frameworks are not evil. Java is not a framework; it's a virtual machine, a language, and a security model. There is no "runtime versioning mess", only poorly-written or packaged applications (though, Java does make it rather easy to write a poorly-packaged application). It's quite possible to write an application that works across the "wide variation in java runtimes", if you know what you're doing.
Moving WW to Java is a very good idea, provided the WW devs know what they're doing. Given past experiences, that may or may not hold.
Unless, of course, you don't comply with the "Windows Genuine Advantage" (TM) requisites. If they really wanted to give you a lawyer-secure system, they would have made one that works with a Free OS.
You must be new here.
Since it will work as an applet, the Java version is probably the best response to MS embedding their 3d map server in an IE browser using ActiveX (or whatever it's called now). This will enable next gen web pages to have really nice controls, and it will all be open source/free data. That's very exciting.
I think the Java naysayers have out of date opinions, JVMs of the past few years are not much trouble to set up and have very good performance. They may use more memory, but if you have a gig in your system you'll be fine. Just look at all the people using Azureus.
It's interesting to see the community pick up the Windows only version, and it'll probably be nicer than the Java version for the first while, but ultimately the Java version is a very interesting development.
But microsoft were very kind and helpful to in providing tools for the development of this project for free, surely they must be a wonderful company, no one else provides such services at such a price... Couldn't they have looked into Mono and the various tools associated with it? Mono isn't just for Linux, and how about OpenGL? They've thrown all this effort at producing a product which is totally tied down to the microsoft platform.
This product looks nice in some places and totally cobbled together in many others, it's a real shame that the developers have decided to go with totally proprietary technologies for their Open Source alternative to Google Earth, what a bunch of cretins.
At the time (with what would be very low-end hardware now) it actually performed pretty well and could serve up 100 fps or so from a Nvidia Geforce II card. Aolserver is multithreaded and the tricky part was getting the hardware rendering queueing code stable.
I did a simple html interface for navigation and the response time from the server at 10ms to generate the image was enough that it felt like a static image off a filesystem. This worked really well when there were large amounts of source data in the image and returning the output images was a lot quicker than returning all the source data and rendering on the client.
I would think that with today's video hardware it would be possible to have a client that lets the user trace a path across the earth, have the server render all of the sequencial images and create a mpeg-4 video and return it to the client real time.
I have all of the C/OpenGL/TCL source from what I did before in a dusty box of CD's marked "Things I got bored with once I got them to work" if anyone is interested in it.
Why use something nasty like flash when you already have a java applet to use in web browsers?
What is the Java version using in place of DX-9? Is it using Java3D? Does that get translated into DirectX 9 on Windows. OpenGL? Which Java libary for OpenGL?
Because initialising the java VM takes (relatively) forever, and is ugly; because then I can integrate with a very capable 3D engine written in Flash.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Now I have to admit it's the flash pages that are the new equivalent of the blink tag that put me off the whole thing more than anything else.
Applets are dead, get over it. I am a java programmer but don't like java applets either.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
... check out the video for some examples But where are they? A link would be nice"So what is so great about 1.4? First of all it is written using .NET 2.0 which allows for some cool new features but more importantly, thanks to Microsoft allowing developers to use visual C# express for free we were able to easily increase the development team, who simply could not afford to purchase visual studio."
What a mix: Open source development, sponsored by Microsoft and the CIA, completely done using closed source applications ....
"An operating system must operate."
"people like amd64 linux users who have to do a fair bit of mucking about to get flash to work?"
Really, this is one of your arguments? I can understand the annoyance of Flash over ads, but you're really going to include 5% of the 5% Linux desktop users out there as a reason Flash sucks? (and those are pretty generous stats)
Admittingly I don't agree with porting this to Flash either since it can't tap hardware acceleration for 3D like Java can, but the arguments against Flash are kinda ridiculous these days. From what I've read, the Flash player team is making the move to 64 bit on all platforms at the same time. Its not just a simple recompile, the JIT compiler and garbage collection need to be made 64 bit aware.
And for that matter google earth does as well (not that street overlay junk).
...at least you can use this Slashdot submission as a textbook example of comma splices.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The arguments against flash have always been ridiculous- the people who rehearse them are impervious to the fact that just because flash is often used to produce the equivalent of a blink tag doesn't always mean that flash is a bad thing. It seems that no amount of logical explanation, Venn diagrams etc etc could help them on this.
The fact is that these people carry so much baggage and are so pig-headed that one wonders what kind of place they should have in the future, technology wise that is.
Isn't it time that Slashdot sidelined them and their foolish arguments once and for all?
you know, right now we are the US's biggest trading partners... But honestly it wouldn't take that much effort on our part to become Chinas largest trading partner.
We should lash out at them by making the portals to their hardware drivers flash only. How can they expect the latest drivers when they don't even watch the ATI logo explode and recombine in a vortex of swirling pixels. The arrogance.
i'd love to see something similar that uses sets of STEREO satellite data, time based flights through the solar system, the ability to visually display CME and their effects on each planet's magnetosphere/plasmasphere.
;)
heck, how about a "milky way wind"?
great work on this guys! it's a great inspiration...
Just no.
Their demos lag visibly on my beast of a gaming machine. Probably not significantly, but it's there. And that's with their demos... no wonder it's called "papervision", everything looks like origami!
Wake me up when we have a browser plugin that actually uses hardware 2D/3D acceleration. Like, say, OpenGL. Because this is just ridiculous.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Interesting, on my Mac Pro (X1900 card), they're fluid and really responsive.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!