Today I got to visit NASA Ames and meet with the World Wind team, Randy, Chris, Patrick, and Patrick. These cats are super-cool and have done some really amazing work. Check it out.
Is this what i think it is? Looks like the software this company produced that got bought by google. Downloading it right now ... :)
Posted by: testboy on April 28, 2005 12:28 AMvery smooth application. but the pictures lack some resolution if compared to commercially available ones and even if compared to the maps.google.com satellite feature.
Posted by: testboy on April 28, 2005 01:26 AMWhat's this, speaking nicely of a C# application building on DirectX? ;-)
Posted by: Jugalator on April 28, 2005 02:43 AMtestboy,
The default images didn't really impress me, either, but you can pick which dataset you are viewing at the top of the screen. If you choose the USGS Digital Ortho, they have good resolution for pretty much all of the US. The USGS Urban Area Ortho is also good for major cities.
testboy,
This is not the same as what Google bought. Google Maps uses Keyhole, which uses commercial imagery. World Wind is a NASA program, and as such the imagery is free to use by the public. Compared to Keyhole, the advantages are that where USGS Urban Area Ortho imagery (from aerial photographs, not satellite), you get an extremely high-resolution color image of 0.25 m. Everywhere else in the US you can get 1 m b&w from USGS, and the whole world is covered by Landsat7 data. Keyhole has relatively high resolution, somewhere in the 0.5-1 m range for the entire US, but international data is not available through Google Maps. I'm not sure how much international data is available in the full Keyhole program.
Personally, I prefer World Wind in general (no copyright watermarks when you zoom in!)
Posted by: Patrick O'Leary on April 28, 2005 08:59 AMI love World Wind! I wish I could run it on ym linux box though :( I really love playing with it...Google Maps is fun, but it just isn't the same because I can't look at all the different data/etc
Posted by: Byron Roush on April 28, 2005 02:51 PMkenny and patrick
i cycled thru all the different data sets before i gave my statement of course. and i know that it is not the same dataset (duh). why would buy google keyhole if the data was free anyway ...
i really hope someone will put something like this up for europe, too :( right now i only know http://www.ausderluft.de/ which has a pretty crappy interface. it has been around for more than 3 years tho. ah well and some aerial fotography of my hometown: http://stadtplan.duesseldorf.de/Duesseldorf/Stadtplan/cgi-bin/perl/index_umschalten.pl?Wohin=Luftbild&Was=InternLink&GK=2554008%2c5677071_undefined&vonWo=&url=&ziel=&text=&ID=
sorry for sounding incoherent, but it's about 1 am now and i just got home from this place: http://www.duesseldorf.de/touristik/bildarchiv/grafik/a009.jpg :pp
Posted by: testboy on April 28, 2005 04:08 PM