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."

Comments

Hmm, time to rewrite the applet as a flash plugin.

[Space cowboy]

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

So....

[Lithdren]

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?

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. :P

PC only?

[azav]

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?

Re:PC only?

[withak]

Supposedly the only thing that in WW won't compile in Mono is the DirectX stuff. There has been talk of an OpenGL port for ages; no one has ever actually started though.

Re:PC only?

[HansWurst]

As somebody already said, there is a java client which uses the same NASA imagery as WW. Also very interesting imho is that the developer of gaia, the once open-sourced client for GE, switched his code to use the NASA data after being shut down by google. Gaia uses the sdl library and therefore should compile on any system sdl supports (from www.libsdl.org: "SDL supports Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS, and OS/2, but these are not officially supported.").

Whoa -- useful for design ...

[mr_luc]

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.

Too true

[DerekLyons]

Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth

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.

Informative? Unfortunate.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hardware Rendered Thin Client Idea

[rohar]

In 2002 or so I wrote a aolserver extension that pulled DEM data from a database and hardware rendered with opengl with a texture, coverterted the output to png and returned it to the browser as an image.

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.