Slashgeo

There has been a lot of news going on with Google Earth and Virtual Earth these days, but let's not forget about World Wind. The Earth Is Square blog has a list of new features that's coming in the 0.60 version of WWJava, expected out sometime mid October to November. Here is a feature summary, but head on over to their blog for more details :

• Air space shapes and volumes - think extruded circles, rectangles, lines or path, terrain following or not, connected to the ground or floating in the air.
• OGC Catalog Service support with an example application to query and visualize resources from several servers.
• Compound elevation model that will allow to overlay several elevation data sets
• New iteration of markers and tracks
• A view control layer that provides a GUI to interact with the view
• A visual measure tool and the supporting classes for length and area
• Geometry based surface shapes - like terrain following polylines for surfaces.
• New iteration of the placename layer
• Terrain/Line geometry intersect test

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 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 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.

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.