The Earth Is Square

A wiki page (There is also a forum page) has been put up so that people can add their WWJava based applications and applets for all to check out.

The list includes the NASA in-house demos as well as applications and applets outside developers have started developing with WWJava.

You should really be sure to check these out: blueMarine,  GeoFlexy, JSatTrak and World Wind Eclipse RCP Geobrowser

These four WWJava based applications and applets give a fairly well rounded look at most the different ways you can use WWJava in your development.

I was forwarded about this yesterday and have not had too much time to look too deeply into it.  But Geoportal is a Brazilian site that has a 2D web map of Brazil and also has a 3D application you can download and use on your computer.  The 3D application, Geoportal 3D, is built on WorldWind 1.4 code.

The Geoportal web site is your standard web map connected to a WMS server.  But I have found that even on a fast connection, it is sluggish to load the imagery.

The free portal now has a 2.700 Brazilian cities with street level and geocoding searches. We also support routes in 600 Brazilian cities and the end of 2007 holds up to 400 Brazilian cities with ortho imagery.

I am going to focus more on the Geoportal 3D application since it is built on WorldWind 1.4 code.  It is more than just a re-branded WorldWind, they have translated the interface into Portuguese and made several GUI changes, as well as revamping the application folder structure.

Below is their startup screen for Geoportal 3D.

Here is the main application after it is started.  The first items you will notice is that is looks more like an ArcGIS  Explorer and Google Earth interface.  The top tool bar is also gone, and in the upper right you have three control features that are also present in Google Earth.

The side bar can also be hidden so you have just a globe view.  The two main functions of the side bad is a search function and access to the layers.  Even the layer control has been changed in an interesting way I will cover later.

Other than those changes, it is your standard WorldWind globe and functions just like WorldWind 1.4.

In this view you can see the top slider controls the tilt of the globe.

Likewise, the slider on the side is your zoom control.

And the compass in the middle lets you rotate the globe.

All three of those features are nice additions to the WorldWind control.  But what I really liked is how they made some changes to the later control.  You have two options on how you want to view the layers, a simple view with just some layers.   And an Advanced view and see ALL the installed layers / add-ons.

That covers the GUI changes that I have noticed, every thing else I have looked at looks like a normal WorldWind install.   The next step will be to check into the data they have available, but that will be for another day, as getting data from their servers is slow going.

A WWJava forum developer has come up with a nice WWJava based satellite tracking application. This application gives you both a 2D and a 3D view of the satellites.

This application allows you to predict the position of any satellite in real time or in the past or future. It uses advanced SGP4/SDP4 algorithms devloped by NASA/NORAD to propogate the satellite orbits. The program also allows for easy updating of current satellite tracking data via CelesTrak.com.

See the developers website for more screen shots and more information on what all can be done with JSatTrak.

What_Nick has a roundup on his blog from a magazine article he has written (Though it seems editorial differences got in the way of making it in the next issue).  He goes into both the Air-Borne Systems and Space-Borne Systems for collecting SAR data.

Interesting reading, but over my head at this time.

Patrick Murris has some tidbits up about some upcoming features to WWJava 0.3.x releases.  The flat earth will allow WorldWind to have both a 'cartographic' flat global view of the globe and 3D terrain.

This may also allow for more projections to be supported.

Also coming up in a better way to view text on the globe, and something that has been requested for a very long time (I am still waiting for HTML Bubble support to be added.. been wanting that long before Google Earth came out).

Ok, if anyone wants to be really nice to me this year.. you can get me one of these.

GTS370

CPU	Two Dual Core Xeon Processor 4MB Cache 2.33GHz (1333 MHz FSB)
Memory	Two 2GB DDR2 ECC Fully Buffered PC2-5300 Memory
Graphics	Two Quadro FX3500 256MB Memory PCIe Video Card
Hard Drive	Three 750GB 7200.10 SATA Hard Drive
Diagonal Size	Three 17"
Resolution	1280 x 1024 5ms

WorldWind would look very nice on a system like this.  So, if anyone is looking to get me something for Christmas.. this is all you need to get me.