NASA World Wind
NASA developed Open Source virtual globe called as World Wind. This software program get run of Microsoft Windows Machine, it gets use on personal computer. This software application overlays NASA and aerial photography, USGS satellite imagery, topographic maps and whatever data available about GIS publicly.
NASA released World Wind Software in 2004, currently latest version of 1.4 which developed by open source community members from World Wind Central, which had its premier on 14 February 2007.
World Wind along with Earth, gives images of Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede, Galiean moons, images of stars and galaxies. File Menu provide all these options.
It is possible to rotate globe, tilt the view, it is also possible to zoom in and out. NASA World Wind display information about five million place names, political bundaries, latitude and longitude lines and other location criteria. It allows browsing maps and geospatial data, it can import ESRI shape files and kml/kmz files.
World Wind support for .X means DirectX 3D polygon mesh, models and advanced visual effects. Resolution inside the US is very high, which enables to see clearly buildings, houses, cars and also shadows of people. At least 15 meter pixel resolution outside US.
Virtual Earth High resolution data incorporated by World Wind which allowed by Microsoft. Digital Elevation Model get used by World Wind which is collected from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. It means that, it is possible to view Topographic features such as Grand Canyon or Mount Everest in three dimensions. It is also possible to see ocean feature like trenches and ridges in 3D with help of bathymetry data by WW.
Users who used to use it can also able to add own data. It makes it available through various sources such as World Wind Central or blogs. It is possible to modify and redistribute Blue Marble, Landsat or USGS public domain on web sites for commercial purposes.
Datasets Available for NASA World Wind:
In the available download low resolution Blue Marble datasets are included. When users Zooms in certain area at that time high resolution data is downloaded from NASA server. Size of data which available is about 4.6 terabytes.
Image Dataset: Blue Marble which is Next Generation imagery, Landsat 7 imagery NLT Landsat, Geocover 1990 and 2000, OnEarth, i-cubed, USGS Imagery, Digital Ortho, Urban Area Ortho, Topographic maps, Zoomit Imagery, LINZ (which contains photography of New Zealand), GSWA (which contains topographic and geological map of Australia), US imagery (which contains montaged color aerial photography of many major US), SRTM.
World Wind Java
World Wind restricted to Windows, relying on the .NET libraries and DirectX. Now future version of World Wind will be developed in Java with JOGL. The new version will be having an API centric architecture with much functionality off loaded to modular components. Internet need plug-in to be installed interchangeably as possible which is Python. It is also possible to access it on Browser. Preview version of the World Wind with Java SDK was released on May 11, 2007.
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