NASA World Wind plug-ins and features
You must have used Google Earth program for seeing your house on the virtual globe. But, it is not the only software giving geographical information to everybody. Many software programs are available in the market today like Earth Browser, Earth Explorer etc. Now, NASA has launched its mapping software for making space shuttle imagery as well as high resolution photography available to everybody.
Users are able to rotate, tilt as well as zoom in and out the selected planet earth. You can see 5 million location names, latitudes and longitudes, political borders and other location conditions. Making use of this the software program, you are able to browse the maps and geospatial information, import kml or kmz files and ESRI shape files. The World Wind can support .X models and higher visual effects like sun shading or atmospheric dispersion. The resolution in the US is enough high to differentiate individual buildings, houses and cars. The resolution exterior to the US is at least 15 m/pixel.
World Wind is a free and open source virtual globe tool that is developed by NASA and open source community intended for use on PCs and runs on Microsoft Windows. The feature of the program World Wind superimposes satellite imagery, aerial camera work, and USGS, NASA, topographic maps as well as openly available GIS data on 3-Dimensional representations of the Earth and other planets. Moreover, to the planet Earth, the World Wind has also covered Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter (and its 4 moons- Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa) and SDSS that has imagery of stars as well as galaxies. In the File menu, all these things are available.
Plug ins are small programs in C#, J# or VB or which are installed and compiled at startups by the software itself. NASA World Wind will definitely help you in getting geographical data in an interesting manner.
Several people supplement the software by adding their own information and making them accessible via different sources such as the World Wind Central or blogs. Images and films are produced by making use of Landsat, Blue Marble, USGS data, as well as can be re-distributed, modified and used for the business purposes. It has various add-ons and plug-ins. Now let us have a look at the types of add-ons included in the World Wind program. Point layers – these are simple XML files that show place marks as icons. Trail layers - paths or routes. Line features - XML with a number of points imagined as a line. Polygon features - XML that includes a collection of points as a filled polygon. Place names - particular points like cities and hills which are given text names. Model features - XML for making 3-Dimensional textured meshes. Image layers - high resolution imagery a number of different locations. Scripts - files controlling camera movement. World Wind can incorporate high resolution data of the program Virtual Earth for non-commercial purposes. World Wind also make use of digital elevation model data collected by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. One can even see topographic features e.g. Mount Everest in 3-Dimension. The software also has bathymetry data so that users can see oceanic features like ridges in 3D.
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