View different worlds virtually using World Wind
National Aeronautics and Space Administration are known as NASA. NASA recently released a World Wind program that is a wonderful virtual globe like Google Earth program. It makes use of the satellite images, aerial views, photography, and topographic maps to obtain a virtual 3-Dimensional model of our planet earth. NASA first released the program world Wind in 2004 year. Later an open source community known as World Wind Central developed it. A number of versions were released after that. The current version 1.4 was premiered on 14th February 2007. This program is operated making use of your personal computers.
The most extraordinary fact about the program world wind is that it is a free software program and any person is able to have an easy access for it. It is user-friendly software program and no special training is needed to run it. This software program can encompass a list of various “worlds”, which you can easily view online. World here simply means planets such as Jupiter, Mars, Moon, Venus as well as Earth.
Pictures as well as topographic images that are assembled through the satellites can be used to form 3-Dimensional Virtual Globe. This globe can resemble to the respective planet and making use of few commands one can rotate, zoom in and out in any desired direction of the globe. It provides users real views of any individual planet and by viewing it, you will virtually feel as if you are visiting that beautiful planet earth.
World Wind is assembled with a number of features. One is able to see the political boundaries, latitude, longitude lines as well as several other location criteria’s. It is affirmed that the features of World Wind program provide users about five million place names as well as allow one for browsing maps and geospatial data, import ESRI shape files as well as kml/kmz files on internet with the help of WMS servers of OGC. This way anybody is able to deliver his or her data.
World Wind applies digital elevation model that is called as DEM, data collected through NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Using this information, you can easily view topographic features of some of the planet Earth’s natural wonders like Grand Canyon and Mount Everest in a 3-Dimensional form. It is also set with other exciting features like 3-D ENGINE, SRTM, GLOBE, blue marble, animated earth, MODIS, place names, LANDSAT 7, Country and State borders, landmark set as well as visual tools. These features are described in detailed way below. VISUAL TOOLS: this feature of World Wind program allows the viewers for using the data that comes with visual guides such as latitude as well as longitude lines, extremely precise coordinate data. It is very helpful in routing when you are traveling.
BLUE MARBLE: The term blue marble refers to our beautiful planet earth. It is a feature, which gives spectacular true color images of the same. This information is collected from the famous satellites such as TERRA and MODIS. You can see it at 1km/pixel resolution.
LANDMARK SET: This is another interesting World Wind feature. This feature allows its users to visit the landmarks on planet earth virtually as it contents 3-Dimensional models of the famous landmarks. A number of people make use of the program world wind for business purposes by adding data to their own data as well as making it available online by the private websites and even blogs.
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