The Earth Is Square

Slashdot put it out first, but really.. they never "report" stuff correctly.  But even New Scientist has the title wrong.  They are reporting that Sony and the University of Alabama have come up with a wide-angle camera that can image a 10-kilometer-square area from an altitude of 7.5 kilometers with a resolution better than 50 centimeters per pixel.

The camera could have military applications too, says the team. Mounted on the underside of an unmanned aerial vehicle, the gigapixel camera could provide almost real-time surveillance images of large areas for troops on the ground.

First up is a 10TB update to the Virtual Earth Imagery (which of course can be seen in World Wind). More cities in 3D and more imagery is added and updated. But please, please, PLEASE update Pennsylvania.. especially in this area! I look at my logs, I know VE devs visit the site so I know they will see this! ;~)

Tisham has an interesting post up about Digital Globe and Google Earth.

Digital Globe trying to push their new acquisition GlobeExplorer as a direct imagery access service. Everything seems to be resolved now, but Digital Globe seems keen to get back to their tried and tested money from imagery sales business model, this time peddling access to global mosaic with a few extra ribbons such as online processing instead of individual QuickBird Scenes

That would put a hold on the Google Earth "exclusivity" to Digital Globe imagery and in reply to Google's "Our Imagery Providers Won't Let Us Share"; Digital Globe has a public, watermarked WMS server of their QuickBird imagery that you can use in World Wind.

And lastly, another Tisham post about adding the Google Geographic Search to the World Wind PlaceFinder via their REST API. So now you have FOUR ways to search for locations, the default World Wind Global Placename Search, the Yahoo! Search, the Global Virtual Earth Search and now the Google Geographic Search. If you still can't find what you are looking for... it must not exist. ;~)

I got passed along this interesting post today.  It is about the Maritime Systems and Technology (MAST) 2007 conference and trade show, but what got the author's attention and mine was this paper; "Maritime Situation Awareness System Based on Open Source Software and Data" by Livingston Davies, Channel Logistics LLC, United States.

This paper will describe an inexpensive but powerful maritime situation awareness system named CASA, based on World Wind (an open source interactive world viewer software tool developed by the USA’s NASA).

The author seems to think that using World Wind may be a better and more affordable, controllable option to Google Earth.  Even if this is the first he has heard of World Wind being used for maritime situational awareness, I know of several groups using World Wind .Net and World Wind Java for similar uses.

News article about a store owner that got tired of being robbed and then told he would never catch the person. He went and put GPS trackers in some of the merchandise and when theft #6 happened, he tracked the criminal right down to his house and informed the police.

He was able to even see when some items were moved to a different location.  Hopefully, he is taking the GPS units out when merchandise is sold though.

Patrick Murris is at it yet again, this time adding a 3D Stereo Anaglyph View to World Wind Java.

For more detailed information, see his blog post.

Here is an interesting article that made it past the sensor net, it is from June 3rd and from the JavaOne conference.  Mainly this article is about JavaFX, but World Wind Java is mentioned a few times.

What really stands out is this comment here from Robert Brewin:

The one demo I would have loved to show onstage if I'd had 10 more minutes would be to take that World Wind app, embedded it on the phone and tie it to a GPS system. Imagine what you could do with that. Real-time GPS tied with satellite imagery on a cell phone.

I'll give them 10 minutes.. (Also going to see if I can get more information on this).