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This was a busy week for the NASA World Wind developers. The Confused Life blog informs us that the World Wind JAVA SDK has been released, this is not the NASA World Wind Java version but it's a significant step closer. The Earth is Square blog provides links regarding NWW Java and an F-16 demo and the accompanying video along with an interview with the NWW Team. From the latter: "Q) How do you see World Wind in comparison to Google Earth and ArcGIS Explorer? NASA World Wind is focused on science, but more than that, World Wind provides the opportunity for others to expand this open source visualization platform in ways only others can imagine."

Late last December we learned about the new possibility to use a Wiimote to navigate into Microsoft's Virtual Earth, the same has been done for the open source NASA World Wind. Meaning more ways to navigate the virtual globes out there.

The Earth Is Square blog reports about this new plugin for WorldWind to ingest the OSM data. From their summary: "Yes, you can get some road data, for the US you have Topo maps. Or you can use the Virtual Earth plug-in. Or you can load shapefiles or your own data. But now we have a WorldWind XML that works in WorldWind.net to load the OpenStreetMap tiles in via a WMS server, all thanks to someone wanting to load the tiles in WorldWind Java.

Open Street Map data is a perfect fit for WorldWind. Why? Because their goal is to make a global road map of the globe that is in the Public Domain and free for all to use without restrictions."

For more information and relative links (including the plugin xml), please visit The Earth Is Square 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.

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.

The Earth is Square informs us the Australian Government use NASA World Wind Java. From the entry: "Just announced today, the Australian Government’s Geoscience department is using WWJava as an application to show data in an interactive way, the data they are showing is of radiologial maps of Australia." See also related stories below.

We received a press release today about a new open source java virtual globe project. While I know you can embed World Wind in a web page already, there is no real support for it. That is why I think a globe like this will make a huge difference.

The pitfalls I saw in my brief highlevel review of the javascript API were the following : No terrain, low resolution basemap, quirky navigation (the globe turns into points if you zoom in too far), no vector support, no raster overlay support and no annotation support (placemarks). The examples page was also quite limited. It would have been nice to have a set of clear examples with source. It left me kind of confused after checking their sponsor page and seeing some of these things in action :


Overall impression, good start, but not ready to be used without heavy servicing. It has great potential, but it's a far way off from being on the same level as more mature globes such as Google Earth, Virtual Earth and even WorldWind. Time and real world usage will only make it better though.

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.

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.

Bull_UK writes "Following the release of World Wind Java 0.6 the project manager from NASA, Patrick Hogan, asked me to make a short video clip showing off some of the new features. The video shows 'Airspaces', multimedia annotations and more, you can find further details at Bull's Rambles." Some related stories copied below.