2005-03-07 21:33:56.241828+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments
Okay all you geodata freaks: If you haven't seen World Wind, go now, sit through the huge download and fly around earth imagery. Very cool, was just going from noting cars on the streets with 1 meter USGS imagery and flying back up to looking at the western half of this continent.
[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Cool Technology Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2005-03-07 23:15:21.108107+00 by: meuon
12 min download.. 15 minutes playing and.. Wow. - Makes me thing of the "globe" in Stephenson's Snow Crash Cyberspace world.. Wow.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-03-08 01:50:00.49221+00 by: meuon
An hour more of playing was spent at work after hours.. Well worth it. I have some serious virtual exploration to do.. and then some road trip / expeditions will have to be done.. The more I played, the more I went 'Wow'.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-03-08 19:31:12.400489+00 by: jeff [edit history]
My download was a little longer, since I had to install the .NET framework and the graphics drivers. I was hoping for feelings of "wow," but they never quite came. The package is very, very good, but I'm a bit disappointed by the speed of the object searching (even though I know it must potentially include hundreds of millions of records or even more).
Maybe I'll be "wowed" the second time around. Still, it was cool to drop directly into Yosemite Valley next to El Capitan, to see roughly where I live in Ohio, and then scroll to Mount Katahdin and the "knife edge" in Maine, all within a few minutes. I did think the interface was pretty cool, and I will recommend it to others ...
#Comment Re: made: 2005-03-09 14:36:11.487935+00 by: petronius
I found an amusing geosite the other day, courtesy of "Ask the Pilot" in Salon. The route mapper demonstrates the best Great Circle route between cities, always a surprise to us brought up in the Mercator projection world. For example, the route from Rio to Sydney passes over the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The only drawback is that it runs on IATA airport codes instead of city names, and if you don't know that the Moscow airport is SVO you'll never find it. It also shows the most distant airport you can get to from your location, handy to avoid process servers.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-03-09 16:25:46.509001+00 by: ebradway
Holy heck, batman!
I had to go ahead and upgrade to Windows XP to get it to work. I was putting this off anyhow. My main workstation had been running for about three years without a clean sweep.
The USGS Urban Area images are huge. This thing is trying to download them in the background. These images are about 80MB for each 1.5km squared. Neat interface though. Very similar to ESRI's ArcGlobe (but alot cheaper!).