Slashgeo

The Earth Is Square reports that the new WorldWind Java 1.0 will be released at JavaOne. From their summary: "NASA World Wind provides 3-D virtual globe technology that you can put in your applications. It’s a visual component based on the JavaBeans™ component architecture, with an extensible API and a friendly user interface that you can easily enhance or even replace. It can be used as-is or highly customized. You can put one or more in your programs or your web pages. In a web page, you can control it with the JavaScript™ programming language. It’s as good as it sounds; it’s what the world has been waiting for."

Visit the Earth Is Square blog for more information.

The Earth is Square blog informs us about GeoMapApp, a virtual globe using the NWW Java API. From the entry: " GeoMapApp is a data exploration and visualization tool that is continually being expanded as part of the Marine Geoscience Data System. [...] But more than that, this is a very good example of how useful the WWJava API is, instead of having a full virtual globe and adding to it, you just add the globe view to your application."

The Earth Is Square blog informs us that there is a ray casting and line of sight implementation in WWJava by way of Patrick Murris's blog. Here is an excerpt from Patrick's blog : "It is a common issue to be able to find out where in the world does a line intersect the terrain surface. The WorldWind Java SDK allows to resolve the intersection from the eye point of view using the pick process - based on drawing objects in unique colors, but that does not help much when you need to compute such intersections from another perspective, like for line of sight calculations."


Please visit the links above for more information.

ecoresearch writes "At this year’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco, NASA developers showed that virtual globes are not only suited to explore geographic maps, but can also serve as rendering engines for other types of imagery. Tom Gaskins, who leads the NASA World Wind engineering team, demonstrated the first public Knowledge Planet prototype, a Java applet developed by the Austrian IDIOM Research Project that visualizes large document collections using a landscape metaphor. The peaks of the virtual landscape indicate abundant coverage on a particular topic, whereas valleys and oceans represent sparsely populated parts of the information space. The applet draws upon the extensive news archive of the Media Watch on Climate Change, which provides a continuously updated account of media coverage on climate change and related issues." Some related stories below.

The Earth Is Square blog has a nice summary and movie showing off WorldWind Java running on a multi touch surface. There isn't much of a summary, as the video speaks for itself, so head on over there to check out the video. The concept itself isn't really new, as it was presented here in February 06 using WW. Check out the related stories for posts we've done in the past relating to multi touch.