What’s new in NASA’s latest 3D imagery software World Wind
NASA World Wind is another open source virtual globe available for common users. It’s been designed to used on personal computers which have Microsoft Windows as an operating system. It is developed by NASA and open source community. The program overlays data and imagery from different sources like NASA, USGS satellite, aerial photography, topographic maps, and publicly available GIS data on 3D models of our planet as well as other planets.
Overview: The first public version of World Wind was released in 2004 by NASA. The latest version is the version 1.4. It is developed mainly by an open source community members. Most of these members are from World Wind Central and Free Earth Foundation community. It was premiered on February 14 2007.
Besides the earth there are a number of other worlds in World Wind. Some of these are Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus. Apart from these, Galilean moons of Lo, Europe, Ganymede, and Callisto and SDSS i.e. imagery of stars and galactic can also be viewed through NASA World Wind. The options for choosing all these are available in the file menu.
You can interact with a particular planet by rotating it tilting the view, zooming in and out, etc. The views also feature for five million placenames; latitude/longitude lines political boundaries, other location criteria. All these are displayed right on the images.
World Wind provides the ability for browsing through maps and geospatial data on the internet. This is done with the help of OGC's and WMS servers.(note that version 1./4 also allows makes use WFS for downloading names of places, import ESRI kml/kmz files and shape files. From this you can see that World Wind allows anybody other deliver their data.
The other features of World Wind consist support for X and models (DirectX 3D polygon mesh) and advanced visual effects such like sun shading and atmospheric scattering.
The resolution in cities in United States is such high that individual buildings, cars, houses etc are clearly seen this. This is possible because of the USGS Digital Ortho layer. In the metro areas, the resolution is still higher and you can even distinguish shadows of people. This has been possible because of USGS Urban Ortho Layer. Even the regions outside United States are covered under a minimum resolution of 15 meters per pixel.
NASA World Wind has acquired rights to incorporate Virtual Earth high resolution data for non-commercial use.
NASA World Wind makes use of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data. This data was collected by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography mission. This data provides you views of topographic features like Mount Everest or Grand Canyon in three dimensions. Besides this NASA World Wind also has Bathymetry data through which you can view the ocean features, like trenches, ridges, etc in 3D.
These applications are being used by people for adding their own data and making it available to others through the sources like World Wind Central or blogs.
NASA World Wind permits to freely modify, re-distribute, movies and images which you create by using its features.
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