The Earth Is Square

Just have to tease people with some more screen shots of World Wind 1.4's rendering of views.

Pat Murris has been making some fixes to the atmospheric scattering code, forum thread, and here are the results:

Tenerife, Spain with sunset

Mt-Fuji, Japan, daylight

Himalaya, facing sun

Now all that is needed is realistic clouds

James Fee let me know tonight that the ArcGIS Explorer is now released for the public to download and use.

You can download it from here, but you will need to register to download, of course. 

I will get a chance to see more about ArcGIS Explorer in January when I present at the Virtual Globes Symposium, ESRI will be presenting as well.

Gaia has posted two letters they have received from Michael T. Jones the Chief Technologist of Google Earth and Maps.

The kindness through which Google has made the wonder of our planet vailable to more than 100 million users around the world is now threatened-- not by a menacing and fierce business competitor -- but by you.

Ouch!

If so, we really need to have you take down that code and refocus your work toward building an open earth viewer that uses open earth images (such as from NASA)

Again, I offer to have the Gaia Devs come to our meetings.. we have one next week.

    Please understand that the Digital Globe satellite cost about 500M so the data is *very* expensive. We are like an iPod for Earth images. If people could get the music out to play on other platforms then the music companies would not allow Apple access to the music in the first place. This is the situation.

Hmm.. does that make World Wind a non-DRM, 20$ and just as good MP3 player then?  And how much did Google shell out for youtube?

If anything, it is interesting reading.  And again goes back to something that came up during the summer.. Google is saying it is Digital Globe restricting them and a Digital Globe rep has said it is not that way.  Would be REALLY nice to actually see this contract between Google and Digital Globe.

Just had to share this :) 

My Mastercard commercial...

Loss of pay from waiting in line 2.5 days and using friday as a resting day: ~ $1000 

Buying a PS3: ~ $700

Buying the two year warranty: $100 

Buying three PS3 Games: ~ $180

Buying an extra controller: ~ $50

One Blue-Ray Movie: ~ $30

.

.

.

.

Listing all this on EBay and not double checking and selling it all for $0.99?  PRICELESS!

This came up on the IRC channel tonight and they posted a link to the related Digg article.  Gaia is an attempt to reverse engineer Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and extendable way.

BUT.. you get this on their web page:

25 November 2006, we've got the letter from Michael Jones, the Chief Technologist of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local search, requesting us to cease reverse engineering and improper usage of licensed data that Google Earth use. We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).

Nice to see that Google is keeping on the ball with "Thou Shall Not Use GE Imagery Outside of a Google OK'ed Medium".  Which is a "Bad Thing" because people don't realize that giving their imagery to Google means you can only view the imagery with what Google says you can view it with.  Which takes the imagery out of the public domain.

The project may continue it's life as open source 3D earth viewer with GPS support, but without support Google Earth imagery. We are sorry.

Might I suggest then, coming to a World Wind OS team meeting and joining up with the World Wind Developers?  You are re-inventing the Open Source Wheel

Update: Found a screen shot someone posted:

I have already covered Geody already, a really nice location search engine.  Well, now the developer has enabled a "narrow screen" version that works with World Wind's new web browser component. 

Observe:

This is in World Wind version 1.4 and can be seen in the next release candidate build, or you can compile yourself from the source.