The Earth Is Square

Ok, found out tonight that World Wind 1.5 will get it's "own XML", called WorldWind Markup Language. Interesting enough, it didn't come from the NASA World Wind team.. but outside and above them (though they had some input into the structure). It is for the most part GML+WW_Needed_Features.

From the IRC channel tonight:

dumdumhead: hehe... I'm a "contributer"
dumdumhead: but all I said was "if your going to make another xml schema, at least base it on GML"
dumdumhead: the higher-ups didn't want to depend on KML for internal xml representation of data
dumdumhead: and GML by itself isn't enough
dumdumhead: there needs to be a GML-based solution that has a proper specification to work with World Wind

You can read the spec sheet to see the initial phase of it.

Here you can see how the wwml would looked as compared to a kml:

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/dev/MoonLandingFeature.wwml
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/dev/MoonLandingFeature.kml

A wiki page for comments has been setup here.

I'll post more as I learn more.. I have just skimmed over the 20 page file sofar.

Ok, not exactly World Wind.. but WW2DPlusone which is a community port of World Wind that does run on Macs and Linux and Winds.

This was done by what_nick and he has a little blurb about it in his blog.

As you can see this is running on a Zynx, touchscreen computer and could be used for in car navigation if you plugged a GPS into this as well.

(He "says" it was just a test of the video card)

On April 24 there was a demo for the people at the USGS about World Wind and it's uses. One of the key points of the demo was the showing off of my Earthquake Plug-In for World Wind. And when I asked how it went, here is the reply:

Primo! Your plug was a very powerful indicator of the possibilities for the USGS. They got it! Now well see what happens. Thanks much for all the effort, it certainly was one of the 'telling' differences for World Wind.

Hopefully.. this will spur them to fix the database relation for their water data so I can add A LOT more real-time data to World Wind.

Now.. to do some bug fixes to the earthquake code and start planning for the 2.1 version of the plug-in.

The NOAA DART (Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis) Project is part of the U.S. National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP), an ongoing effort to maintain and improve the capability for the early detection and real-time reporting of tsunamis in the open ocean.

This add-on displays the locations of the 16 current bouys that are located around North America, clicking on the bouy marker will take you to the real-time data page where you can get the current water column depth at that location.

As you can see in this image. The DART Bouy is anchored to the ocean floor and receives a data signal from a device on the ocean floor.

And here is a screen shot of the DART add-on in use:

And a sample of the results page:

You can download the add-on here.

I changed the DNS yesterday.. and it takes a few days to move through the system.. so the site may go blank pover the weekend as I move eveything to the new site and get all set back up.

Also, I will have a new add-on released today. The NOAA Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis Project (DART) add-on. It is a marker of all the DART bouys you can click on to get water column depth information. This is near-real-time data and used to warn of Tsunamis (Tidal Waves).

NASA World Wind 1.3.4 is now released! You can download it from sourceforge. To see what all is new, check this URL.

1.3.4 is the last is the 1.3.x series. The next major release will be World Wind 1.5.

Breif Overview of what is new:

New Datasets:

• Mars
• Venus
• Jupiter
• SDSS

New Included Plug-Ins:

• Movie Recorder: Movie recording script. Plays back a script file with camera positions and records each frame to sequentially numbered bitmap files on disk, via Mashi
• Measuring tool: measure distances/bearings on the globe, via Mashi
• Starfield: adds a dynamicaly rendered starfield background to World Wind using data from the Hipparcos catalog, via Patrick Murris
• Compass Rose: renders a compass in World Wind, via Patrick Murris
• Clock: On-screen clock, via Mashi
• Earthquake Plug-In: Near-Real-Time Earthquake display and Historical Earthquake Query, via Chad Zimmerman
• KML Importer: Import Placemarks from KML and KMZ files, via ShockFire

And many, many bug fixes and improvements. See the "What's New" page for a full list.