Slashgeo

The GIS Lounge has a pretty detailed article up with a couple of pics. Head on over there for the full scoop. Here is part of their summary : "Recently a first version of the interactive 3D city information system Heidelberg-3D.de was made available online. It can be used freely by anybody. The core of the system is one of the first implementations of the OpenGIS Web 3D Service (OGC W3DS) discussion paper. The system comes with a free 3D-Client called . This client is a Java WebStart-Application and will be installed automatically if you follow the respective URL and if Java 6 is already installed on the computer."

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."

The Earth Is Square blog has screenshots of the upcoming WWJava release. From their blog, the new features are airspace shapes and volumes, terrain conforming or not, distance and Area measuring tool and markers. For more information and more screenshots, please visit the blog.

The Earth Is Square has some information on this. From reading it, it appears it's more like a request for some help. Here is part of their summary : "Tim G from the WorldWind Fourms has been making some nice headway in his sparetime with getting KML support working within WWJava. He has the code available for anyone to try and to make improvements on.

From the Readme file:

Right now there is support for: ploygons (including extruded polygons with holes), lines (including tesselated lines, no extrusion) and points (but only displayed as pushpins). There is no support for overlays, complex(dae) 3d models, regions, animation, etc. It only knows how to read a few things from the KML file. So if you load a file with it and see nothing, that feature is probably just not supported."

The Earth is Square shares a few NASA WorldWind news, including it's important change of mission: "World Wind therefore changed its mission: from providing a single information browser to enabling a whole class of 3D geographic applications. Instead of creating one program, we create components to be used in any number of programs. World Wind is NASA open source software. With the source code being fully visible, anyone can readily use it and freely extend it to serve any use. Imagery and other information provided by the World Wind servers is also free and unencumbered, including the server technology to deliver geospatial data. World Wind developers can therefore provide exclusive and custom solutions based on user needs." Related there's a WorldWind Java multitouch wall and the WWJ coverage at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference. See also related stories below.

The EiS blog provides recent coverage of NASA World Wind, including mentioning GeoWind and Capcode: "Capcode is a free software able to retrieve data from the NMEA compatible equipments of your boat to be displayed on the PC screen after some computations. The main purpose is to provide a tool for regattas." From the GeoWind website: "GeoWind is an open source GIS platform that integrates OGC as implemented GeoTools within NASA's WorldWind. The vision of this effort is the creation of an open geospatial system that enables the scientific modeling process to be closer to a 'real world' experience. Some of the planned and anticipated use cases are querying and mapping available data for modeling problems using OGC web services, stepwise delineation of model parameter, embedded execution of an environmental model and its direct mapping of state variables into a world view, or simply the mapping of spatial/temporal model results in a realistic way that was never possible in the past." It's important to note that GeoWind is "in early development". Don't forget NWW got a new mission lately.

The Earth is Square informs us NASA World Wind Java offers an improved Microsoft Virtual Earth layer and OpenStreetMap layer. From the former entry: "WorldWind forum member Omega has been busy working on the Virtual Earth code for WWJava and has made a nice number of improvements. You can download the code for your own WWJava project. He wants to do a Google Earth version… but I recomended he had better not.. since Google has a “Take but not Share” policy and I don’t want to have Google Lawyers calling Patrick about it." NWW Java is somehow an open source competitor of the Google Earth Plugin, which may explain Google's reaction. See also some related stories below.

I admit my total surprise at learning NASA World Wind has 14.9 million users. Not bad for an open source competitor to Google and Microsoft amongst others. If you're curious, Google Earth has been installed 400 millions different computers (see Michael Jones' comment for that entry for their calculation methods). The Earth is Square also informs us that Yahoo! Maps can now unofficially be loaded as a WWJava layer. Some related stories copied below, see also our NASA topic. Update: 02/11 17:58 GMT by S : Well, it seems the real number of NWW users isn't that high. See comments below.

Bull_UK writes "The Open Source community has been asking NASA to allow them to access the Java SDK codebase more easily for some time, World Wind Java's lead developer Tom Gaskins has listened to this and has set up a publicly accessible nightly builds server, up until now code has only been made available as point releases, this new strategy should allow for contributions from community developers to be integrated more easily, and encourage more interaction between the Java team and Open Source developers.

The first nightly build contains many improvements from the last public release, including terrain conformant Airspace shapes and volumes, ‘on-screen display’ layers, ContourLine renderable primitive, DDS compressor with support for mipmaps, applet package updated for Sun Next Generation Java plugin support, experimental hybrid tessellator to better handle the poles, and much more.

Unfortunately there will be no SVN repository for a while yet, this quote from Tom Gaskins explains why "The reason is that our sponsors rely on the consistency and correct operation of the daily code and want zero possibility of unauthorized modification, and we are required to minimize the possibility that code that is not supposed to be made public remains out of the public releases." This is somewhat disappointing, but given the current economic climate it is necessary for NASA to use outside funding, and therefore they must respect their sponsors requests.

More information can be found at Bull's Rambles, The Earth is square and Patrick Murris' blog, the builds can be downloaded directly from http://builds.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.asp." The EiS blog details the changes between 0.5 and 0.6 and provides a few screenshots. See also some related stories below.