The Earth Is Square

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.