Earth 3D - your own 3D earth browser
Earth3D is a software program that visualizes earth in real-time 3D view. The software uses data from USGS, NASA, CIA, and city of Osnabruck. These organizations have given permission to access their data. Earth 3D is now available as binary for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux under GPL license. The program has many amazing features. It allows you to view the planet as a whole. You can zoom in until cities, countries and even single homes become visible. At present, the feature is limited to city of Osnabruck, Germany). It can embed external data such as cloud data or current earthquake positions.
Earth3D program exists as a C++ and Java application. Both these versions can be used easily at least on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Speed of both these applications is very similar. Most of the users make use of this application for viewing earth. Therefore, if you want to use Earth3D only to view the planet then you should use the web start version, as it doesn't require any installation. Currently the web start version does not contain all features yet. There are many people who want to integrate Earth 3D into their own application.
Earth 3D program was actually developed as QT based C++ program that would run on all 3 operating systems. However, it took some time to support all the platforms. The java version of Earth3D is fast enough to support OpenGL based 3D graphics. Earth3D was ported to Java and some enhancements were made to make it even faster. You can retrieve the Java code from Source forge's subversion repository.
Compiling Earth3D
Following are the steps required in order to obtain a startable configuration of the software:
1] Check out sources from Sourceforge.
2] You should obtain JOGL for the platform from jogl.dev.java.net and then put the libraries into lib sub directory of Earth 3D project.
3] Compile it by using “lib” as the library directory and “src” as the source directory using the IDE.
4] Begin the class earth3d.main.jearth.Earth3dMain.
In order to get a review of this software, you should access the official website of Earth 3D. The website contains some videos that give an overview about the functions and features of earth3D. These videos are encoded with DivX. Some of the videos display the software in action. If you want to get an idea about the basic features of the software then you must access these videos.
Many people don't know how to obtain server software. It is now available easily via source forge's CVS. It is a command line tool tested under Linux. You can use it for adding maps to global map. For instance when you see at “MODIS satellite map earth” you will find several smaller maps that are embedded into global map. In areas like Japan, Florida, and Europe, quadtree is much deeper to serve higher resolution images. Command line tool can be used easily for integrating these maps by specifying the coordinates and map file where it must be embedded.
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