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World Wind: NASA earth viewer

Started by mutex Mar 12, 2005 at 9:21 AM 18 replies 4.2k views

Original Post

Mar 12, 2005 at 9:21 AM

I came across World Wind, an open-source Earth viewer from NASA. It presents to you the globe and downloads data in realtime to display more terrain detail in any area of the world. The highest level of detail doesn't seem too great (can't find my house, for example), but it's still cool nonetheless. One interesting thing is that it's written in C# and uses Managed DirectX for its graphics. I'm running it on a laptop with a Mobility Radeon 9200 at windowed nearly 1680x1050 resolution with decent performance. It has a bunch of different data sets you can use. Be sure to check out the Scientific Visualization Studio in the toolbar. There are a lot of neat animations you can view.

Running on my computer viewing Mt. St. Helens using the Landsat Psuedo dataset:

Here's a picture (png) of it loading data while viewing Vietnam:

There's a game I want to write after graduating from university, and turns out the graphics engine would be very similar to this :) Great to see that it'll be doable.

BradDaBug

Mar 12, 2005 at 9:25 AM

omg free textures!

Captain Maple

Mar 12, 2005 at 9:25 AM

Oh that's just awesome. Thanks for the link!

Boris Karloff

Mar 12, 2005 at 9:45 AM

That's far out. That mountainous landscape looks great. I take it it renders this from sattelite height-map data, or something?

Have to try that in a bit, thanks for the link.

evelyn

Mar 12, 2005 at 9:55 AM

This is really nice :) I'm waiting for a quieter period to download it though, as it's taking over an hour on my m/c...

Dmytry

Mar 12, 2005 at 10:03 AM

Yes, it's very cool. I heard about it before, but anyway.

I'd ++ you but i already ++'ed to maximum... ++, anybody?[grin]

mutex

Mar 12, 2005 at 10:05 AM

Yeah, it's data from satellite images, although it can also do stuff like display state and country boundaries, and topographical maps for some areas, so it's not limited to satellite images.

Right now I'm playing around with Rapid Fire Modis. It displays events on the globe as little icons. Clicking them will download an image of the event and overlay it on the globe. There are some awesome images through this (floods, dust storms, hurricanes).

Aiya, should probably study for my spanish final that's in... 2 hours. Okay one last picture and back to spanish: I'm viewing a picture of Hurricane Jeanne overlayed on the globe. You can see icons for other events in the area.

benryves

Mar 12, 2005 at 10:19 AM

Quote:
Original post by evelyn
This is really nice :) I'm waiting for a quieter period to download it though, as it's taking over an hour on my m/c...

It took under a minute here. University internet connections are wonderful. [smile]

It's taking an aeon or three to install, though... [sad]

Boris Karloff

Mar 12, 2005 at 10:48 AM

Quote:
Original post by Dmytry
I'd ++ you but i already ++'ed to maximum... ++, anybody?[grin]

Done aaand done, my good man.

mutex

Mar 12, 2005 at 4:09 PM

The USGS Urban Area Ortho button loads detailed images for cities (at least Seattle is included). Right now I can zoom from a view of the entire world right up to my house and see the blurry pixels of the previous owner's truck. Based on the buildings present in the areas I've looked at, the images appear to be about 2 years old. One strange thing is when I'm this zoomed up things start getting jerky and jumpy, as if it can't decide where to look at. Maybe it's a precision problem?

Too bad the program isn't dialup friendly. My download cache is already 1.7 GB in size :)

Nice Coder

Mar 12, 2005 at 4:16 PM

I don't have a good enough graphics card to view it.... :(

From,
Nice coder

Ilici

Mar 12, 2005 at 4:19 PM

If you want that "WOW" factor to kick in, switch to US Urban Area Ortho and zoom onto Washington. Find the White House, in the back there's a car that's parked crooked :) I'm guessing the resolution is less than 1 meter.

However the USGS Urban Area maps are quite few, or so I seem to have found. Not even New York has one. I was looking forward to seeing Manhattan with a nice resolution.

Another cool thing is: Map of Norway, zooming to maximum in Oslo gives a resolution of around 20cm.

smart_idiot

Mar 12, 2005 at 5:21 PM

This thing is awesome. Someone needs to combine it with Orbiter.

smart_idiot

Mar 12, 2005 at 7:07 PM

This used to be my trip to school. I wasn't very fond of it.

Great Lakes for some sense of scale.

[Edited by - smart_idiot on March 12, 2005 7:07:49 PM]

v0dKA

Mar 13, 2005 at 3:26 PM

Hmm, does anyone know the precice latitude and longitude of Area 51

?

No, seriously though, according to this site, it's around 155* 45' W and 36* 12.5' N. I transformed this to WorldWind's coordinate system (using positive/negative instead of N/S E/W, and decimals instead of minutes), took a look around, and the only suspicious thing I found is at coordinate (Lat. = 37.79771, Long. = -116.77911). Punch this into WorldWind, zoom in, and look:

(Sorry for the size, using a free webspace account [sad])

Is that Area 51?

Lode

Mar 13, 2005 at 4:01 PM

Would it be possible to get this to work under Linux?

Ilici

Mar 13, 2005 at 4:37 PM

Quote:
Original post by Lode
Would it be possible to get this to work under Linux?

You could try Wine or Cadega. As i recall Wine has .NET support, however WorldWind combines .NET with directX so you'll probably need Cadega.

andromeda

Mar 13, 2005 at 6:07 PM

Quote:
Original post by v0dKA
Hmm, does anyone know the precice latitude and longitude of Area 51 ?

No, seriously though, according to this site, it's around 155* 45' W and 36* 12.5' N. I transformed this to WorldWind's coordinate system (using positive/negative instead of N/S E/W, and decimals instead of minutes), took a look around, and the only suspicious thing I found is at coordinate (Lat. = 37.79771, Long. = -116.77911). Punch this into WorldWind, zoom in, and look:

(Sorry for the size, using a free webspace account [sad])

Is that Area 51?

Go to Lat. (37.65104), Long. (-115.80389). THAT, my friend, is Area 51. Notice the blue dots, and it's right next to Rachel, Nevada.

extralongpants

Mar 13, 2005 at 6:54 PM

Quote:
Original post by mutex
The highest level of detail doesn't seem too great (can't find my house, for example), but it's still cool nonetheless.

I was able to zoom in close enough to clearly see my house. I think I had to put it in "Urban Area Ortho" mode.

World Wind is one of the most amazing programs I have ever seen.

Captain Maple

Mar 13, 2005 at 8:27 PM

Quote:
Original post by benryves
Quote:
Original post by evelyn
This is really nice :) I'm waiting for a quieter period to download it though, as it's taking over an hour on my m/c...

It took under a minute here. University internet connections are wonderful. [smile]

It's taking an aeon or three to install, though... [sad]

What connection do you have? 5mbit? 10mbit? I have 5mbit on most days, 10+ on others, it all depends on server location. This download took about 2 or 3 minutes.

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