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 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 Earth Is Square brings us the following news : "Only took what… a long time… but there is a 1.4.1 Alpha of the WorldWind Globe.  This is the first WorldWind release where we did not have any NASA involvement. It has been verified to work on XP, Vista and Windows 7."

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.

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.

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.

blueheeler writes "PanglossTech has released Global Markets for World Wind, an extensive package of market and economic datasets that explores recent worldwide financial trends. Data categories include equity market changes, trade, financial, energy, agricultural and human components of the global economy.

This World Wind add-on includes over 250 maps covering over 100 aspects of the world market. The high resolution graphics are compiled from the leading data sources to provide presentation and publication quality analyses. Users can evaluate the many aspects of the global marketplace with easily interpreted comparisons of the fundamental characteristics of international trade and commerce.

Derived from the most current statistics available, Global Markets for World Wind allows exploration and presentation of economic information at both educational and reference levels in an easy to use, intuitive package." Some related stories copied below.