Slashgeo

Both Ogle Earth and the Google Earth Blog share enthusiastic reviews of 3DConnexion's SpaceNavigator input device which allows six degrees of freedom, able to control Google Earth, SketchUp and more to come. From Ogle Earth: "But does it work? Oh yeah. After about 2 minutes my left hand disappeared and I began to mind-meld with Earth. Think Rotate and that's what Earth does. Push in and you zoom in. It's a completely new level of control, and it's completely addictive. The sensitivity is proportionate to your altitude, so at sea level you can work with sub-meter precision. Zoom out and you can traverse the world in a second. Look up above the horizon if you like, or pan, zoom and rotate all at once. You can make yourself queasy without trying very hard."

Spatially Adjusted tells us there is now a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator driver for ESRI ArcMap 9.2. Meanwhile, The Earth is Square tells us NASA World Wind 1.4 is officially supported. Is this newsworthy? Well, judging on this video, it may help ESRI's ArcMap users improve their efficiency in some cases. From the developer in a SA's comment: "This is my own temporary solution until ESRI or 3Dconnxion releases the “official” driver. I just love SpaceNavigator, and I couldn’t wait. I tested this “beta” driver using ArcMap 9.1 and 9.2, and it seems to work."

A few geobloggers previously shared their experience with 3DConnexion's SpaceNavigator. What it is? This input device replaces your mouse allowing you to navigate within virtual globes. Google Earth is supported (even the Mac version with GE 4.1), ArcMap 9.2 and NASA World Wind and even Microsoft's web-based Virtual Earth is supported along with various other apps such as SketchUp. Read more below for my "review".

Ogle Earth has a small blurb about this in it's news today. It points to a blog with a little more information here. Here is the summary from that blog : "Time Navigator can animate any ESRI Shapefile with point geometry and a timestamp field. The timestamp fields can be date, numeric or textual. Time Navigator is developed as a custom task for ArcGIS Explorer build 410 and can be downloaded from downloaded from ArcScripts (source code is included)."

mickmel writes "Google Earth Hacks is days away from their 10 millionth file download. Coupled with the roughly 250 million Google Earth downloads and well over 1,000 posts at the Google Earth Blog, it appears that Google Earth continues to be as popular as ever. To mark the occasion, 3DConnexion has supplied a couple of their awesome SpaceNavigators to give away. The contest is simply to see who can most accurately guess the date/time of the 10 millionth download. More details about the contest can be found here, and here is the thread to enter."

The Earth Is Square blog brings us news about this. Hop over there to view the video. Here is their summary : "Rgosh from the WorldWindCentral fourm has some code he has developed to make the SpaceNavigator work in Linux for WWJava."