NASA World Wind Introduction
Some of the NASA World Wind features which you can use for this purpose are Blue Marble, Landsat, or USGS public domain data. You can even use them on websites even for commercial use. We know there are number of earth satellite imagery programs. Many of these use satellite imagery almost a month or two old. But a special thing about NASA it is able to shoe you real time traffic data if you have very high speed internet connection.
Add-ons and plugins: NASA World Wind is loaded with a number of Add-ons and plugins. The add-ons are actually small extensions, which provide added functionality to NASA World Wind. A few of these are discussed under.
Point layers: these are simple XML files which display place marks i.e. points of interest in the form of icons.
Trail layers: paths i.e. routes and boundaries.
Line features: XML having a list of points which are visualized as a line or wall.
Polygon features: this is a KML having list of points which are visualized as a filled polygon (extruded or flat).
Model features: XML useful for loading 3D textured meshes.
Placenames: these are names for specific points like cities hills, buildings. They are assigned textual labels.
Image layers: they provide high resolution imagery for different places around the world.
Scripts: these are files which control camera movement.
Plugins are small programs, which are written, in C#, VB, or J#. They are loaded and compiled at the time of starting up World Wind. Features can be added, by plug-in developers, to World Wind without changing the programs source code.
World Wind Java: At this moment World Wind is restricted to Windows, and it relies on the .NET libraries and DirectX. However, the future version are about to be developed and Java along with JOGL. This new version is will have API-Centric architecture with functionalities that are 'off-loaded' to modular components. The API is left at the core.
The aim behind doing it is to allow users to use plugins as interchangeably as possible. This is done via Python. Because of these changes, users would be able to access World Wind via a browser in future. NASA released a preview of World Wind Java SDK on May 11, 2007. The occasion was Sun Microsystems’s annual Java One conference.
Datasets available
You get the Blue Marble datasets along with the initial download. However, when you zoom in at some areas, the further high-resolution data is downloaded from NASA servers. At this moment, the total size of all datasets available, is about 4.6 terabytes.
Specifications of NASA World Wind
Baseline resolutions
The baseline resolution for Blue Marble Next Generation is about 500 maps
and for Landsat imagery (excluding the polar areas)
High-resolution imagery
United States
USGS Digital Ortho has a resolution of about 1 meter.
USGS Urban Area Ortho has a resolution of about 0.25 meter per pixel.
Zoom it! Has a resolution which ranges between 0.15 to 1 meter.
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