Nasa World Wind Virtual Earth Plugin
Well my g/f just got a new bike and when she is coming to mine from work theres this nasty roundabout in the way that no one really likes, however there is a route that can get her to mine without using the roundabout, but i assume if you put 'town to my house' in whatever map thing it would take the route with the roundabout as that is probably the best route. So i'd alike the ability to draw my own routes without having to use what the computer thinks is the best/fastest route So basically i'd get a map of the area and be able to draw a red line along the oute that i want and then the map program would make my line nice and neat and scale the map appropiately so that it can fit on a peice of paper or maybe synch it to a PDA and GPS facility. Firstly I'd like to know if it is possible for the map to relay information like 'the parking lot is full, or has “3 spaces left” and then ask if I would like to reserve one via mobile/wireless payment Also how will local small businesses or groups plug into this map, its all very well that the big guys get a look in but what about art galleries that just set up shop, or voluntary groups that have meetings on such and such a date, even festivals Does the map change to different modes i.e. Spring time the autumn leaves falling off, or evening when the building lights are on and things are dark, celebrations with lights up and what about disasters like freak floods. Can the map be altered for this? Eagle eye mode seems good, but what about when a new building is made, how will Microsoft incorporate or even become aware of a change in the landscape My main concern is the emphasis on ‘exploring the environment”, that’s okay for today but many on holiday like to know the history of an area.
It would be a shame to have a one size fits all approach that the USA map has at present, as the US does not have much history, history is worth exploring and other countries have much that this kind of web app could exploit So when these guys get round to doing maps of, well just about every other region of the earth from the EU countries and Russia to the far east with the oriental continents and Arabian Emirates; they all have a lot of history with stories attached to them. I would like to see a mode called 'history mode' that allows the person exploring to read up on the history of the area they are looking at: e.g. This are used to be grass land (an option alters the model to show how it was) the locals used to work in mills where their produce was exported to such and such country (and have links to other areas of the globe of that period and then show what that industry is today) I can see some kind of tie in with Encarta. People willing to explore sections of an area would give time to read its history, if a counter was used say (in time machine mode) it would change much of the landscape to grass and trees and then show areas that today sell locally made jams or cheeses, or printing firms that still have links back to that period. These are my immediate feelings on what the map could mean to me and others, allowing them to follow trails such I did from a book touring round the battle scarred boarders between Scotland and England (UK) where there are many Heritage Trees dating back several hundred and even a thousand or more years.
Nasa World Wind Virtual Earth Plugin Free
Some thing like this plotted out would be great, I would like to have blogged my experiences and meet other interested in the same things. I feel sorry for these guys, they all seem to have big bags under their eyes. I was thinking about intergration and routes. My dads in chicago, he's staying i dunno at a ramada or something and he wants to goto one of the big malls out of town. SO he has a Dell Axim and makes a route on MSN maps and saves it, it then offers an RSS feed which he can subcribe too. When he subscribes o it, he starts getting information about traffic conditions and other various things so that before he sets off on his adventure he knows that 4th and 8th street just had a glue lorry tip over and it's taking a long time to get cars moving past there, thus the map can offer a new route. Scoble, basically bring a notepad to london meet (a big notepad and lots of Jones Cream Soda).
Shame it could be a while to get UK arial/satellite shots, I think the only lot done have been commerical (and pretty expensive). I think you would be suprised. World wind uses Landsat 7 data which goes down to 1 pixel / 15 metres resolution for the entire surface of the earth. I believe there are arial photographs of the entire UK freely avaible from a top-down perspective to greater res than that. The 45% angle images would be a different issue, but you could not get those for the entire US anyway, and you certainly would not get them all for the entire UK either. I know it has been mentioned before in this thread but I would urge anyone intrested in this stuff to check out. Its an educational tool rather than a geographical search engine, but it is super cool.
Re the video - the smooth zooming is to me the coolest thing. Thats some amazing Javascript! This is good and timely.
I am glad to MSFT come back and compete with Google-Keyhole with Virtual Earth. It is also nice to see MapPoint and TerraServer assets combined into this.
I am thinking X-BOX, MSFT Flight-SIM, Win-64 applications, true distribution. With Pictometry, a very hot little company now, the 45 degree angle thing is cool, but it will be hard to compete with Google Earth and Keyhole application for panning and zooming at various angles. The ideal would be a combination of Pictometry and the true-fly-through capabilities of Keyhole - skyline-esque approach. Search the world. The key difference, on a contrary point, is the price-point. MSN Virtual Earth will be free and Google Earth will be $30.00 for Keyhole client. Also, note - think about right-click save as, and how to get geospatial intelligence out from system, and packaged, and sent around.
Also, think about digital to analog transforms. Congrats to the MapPoint Team for matching such an impact. Well done with WSJ by the way - well orchestrated from interview with BIll, pre-hype on Virtual Earth, and then announcement, and pre-release. Interesting to see Barclay involved. I was wondering when he would be involved. Nice job to Pictometry for getting this win.
Huge for them. It should be interesting to see whether users can develop GIS-like client-side apps for Virtual Earth and for the Google Maps / Keyhole product, without having a 'real' GIS, by using only AJAX.
If that is possible, it must be painful for MS to watch, given that for years now (ever since the Netscape wars) the mantra there has been 'Windows good, browser bad'. That's why IE has been stagnant, with just one security Band-aid after another applied to it, instead of being completely re-worked, as so many users wanted. The philosophy of MS has been 'rich clients' (and hence 'rich MS'!) requiring Windows, Active X (or now.NET), etc., not browser-hosted scripts. After all, if your apps run in Firefox, who cares about the OS? Ok, i take back some part of that scepticism after seeing the overlay view, as well as the navigation. These guys have done a good job, I just think it should have been done a lot earlier.
Ajax is only new as a term, as a technology is has been around for years. Do keep in mind that Microsoft has excelled at working on the OS and on-built APIs that enable a whole bunch of developers to exercise their creativity in many different directions. By the way, Google Maps would not have been nearly as cool without XMLHTTP, which first appeared in IE 5+ and was coopted by Mozilla and put inside Firefox. The AJAX technology is in fact quite simple in ASP.NET, as has been demonstrated here: Google really has it easy, when they can simply customize a Linux distro (for them, OSS free capital upon which to innovate) for their thousands of servers. And then they can build on top of the XMLHTTP framework that MS has put out years ago. And these 'amazing' projects are simply some guy's 20% time contribution that percolated to the top. But they definitely ramp up the expectation with regard to simplicity and performance, which is a good thing for everyone.
I was just reading this news about Network conjestion information built into Google's map. I this this is great, I would like to see plug-ins so that if I wanted to see all of the wireless networks available then I could install the plugin and voila! I am especially interested in the history side of countrys and its regions, this would also be an excellent plug-in to have.
Also my last question still stands: 'How does that 45 angle work, form what nauticle direction is the camera facing. Is it flexible enough to pan 360deg round the building? How could it be justified to capture the best face of one building at the sacrafice of another?' Can anyone help?
Is this ever going to work with Safari? At the moment it doesn't work. It's slow, contains errors and what does work is unresponsive. All this is seriously hyped and it doesn't even work. Check out the following site on how to do something that works across most browsers and operating systems: Seriously, if MS are going to release public items like this on to the internet, maybe there should be a sub-domain on the internet where MS/IE only stuff can be found.
Other agnostic and standard friendly web sites can live in the rest of the web. So far, I have found that Virtual Earth works well in Mozilla Firefox Version 1.0.2 running on my Mandrake Linux LE 10.2 box.
I tried it on Konqueror and it crashed. Internet Explorer on Windows XP worked without any software issues but it sure is slow. I noticed the tiles not loading as I was zooming in or panning. It was pretty annoying to tell you the truth. Google Maps can drill in a bit further than Virtual Earth can.
Once you get to a certain point (below 150 yards) I get a picture of a camera with a slash through it indicating that I have zoomed to far. Google will let you zoom in as far as you can and still display images albeit blurry. I don't think Microsoft has quite done it yet in terms of beating Google. I think they are definitely in the neighborhood though, but the UI is a tad clunky. Google is much simpler to use. I am also a subscriber to Google Earth so I can tell you with pretty good accuracy that it is far more superior than Virtual Earth. Microsoft might want to consider that rich client after all if they intend to compete.
Also, why bother with such limited data? Get the whole friggin world out there already.
They bragged about the fact that they have been working with cartography for 10+ years but they come out with the US only? Someone is asleep at the wheel. My main complaint right now is the clunky UI and the speed. Did anyone notice that there is a limit on the scratch pad? I got an error saying that I had reached my maximum number of scratch pad entries. I think I only had 4 or 5. Anyone hear of a scroll bar?
Lol Microsoft has done a pretty good job of reverse engineering what Google has done but they are not there yet. I say give it 6 months to a year before we see significant improvements. I hope to see those other features talked about in the taped interview soon.
Well MSN acquired GeoTango on Christmas eve. GeoTango was owned by my GIS prof, Vincent Tao - a brilliant prof and entrepreneur. GeoTango had many patent algo like: SilverEye, allows the rapid creation of 3D urban models from a single image.
Smart Digitizer is essentially a stand-alone tool for building GIS features: roads, rivers, hydrants, etc. GlobeView has the ability to access data from a number of sources including servers supporting the Web Map Service Specification (WMS) from the Open Geospatial Consortium and Microsoft's own TerraServer. So there is some competition with Google Earth in future. As for my Prof, he is on leave (sabbastical) & having good vacation somewhere out there.
Writes 'As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities to the upcoming Java version of World Wind, leaving 1.4 effectively orphaned, but the Open Source community came together and with a lot of hard work we were able to. Some of the new things which differentiate the from the competition are the amazing new visual effects, including HDR, check out the video for some examples. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research.'
The data I had for gornall.net was 1-pixel-per-kilometre. This new data is twice that resolution, and if I combine this new data with the soon-to-be-open-source papervision3d.org, I think it'd be really cool. Geolocate yourself or anyone else by their IP, then zoom around that location in 3d:-) Sounds like a fun thing to put together - maybe this weekend for the 2D stuff, and as soon as the 3D engine is open-source, I'll include that:-) As always with this sort of thing, it's getting hold of the data that's the hard part - kudos to those giving it away free to research, education, and me:-) Simon. Good point - but what about things like office environments where flash is disabled by default, people like me that just don't like annoying flash animations appearing and locking up slow machines so have it turned off and people like amd64 linux users who have to do a fair bit of mucking about to get flash to work? Java works well, is (was?) far better optimised than flash, has less security problems and is cross platform. I'm not convinced rewriting the same thing in flash would be an improvement - a re.
Well, it is, I suppose - for Flash. No, really, it's not something I'd complain about, except that these demos really are pretty simple, and I shouldn't be getting any lag at all. Quake 4 performs about as well on this system, on High settings, so you can see why that's annoying. I could show you another benchmark, too, that I'm curious to see someone replicate on a non-Linux version of Flash.
Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino, and an official language of Switzerland, Croatia, and Slovenia. Pimsleur spanish free. It’s the simplest way to start speaking a new language today. It is spoken by about 66 million worldwide.
YouTube Flash uses some 50% of my 1.8 ghz CPU running a video fullscreen. Save that video with the Firefox VideoDown. There's a lot of three-dimensional content to be generated before that can happen. If I knew a bunch of brilliant graphics-analysis programmers, I'd want to put together a startup to do mapping for video games and other driving simulations. You need to capture rough geometry and texture map data for everything you drive.
The system needs to recognize signs (probably best done with a combination of lidar and radar) and make textures for them, too. Finally, it's got to know where the vehicle is (DGPS?). I dont think it needs to be even that complicated.
I'd want the layouts of the roads accurate for such a thing, but the rest is rather subjective. Sure, know where the houses are, and roughly how big, but they dont need to be identical. Using data from nice satalite images would be enough. You'd want it to dynamically generate property, people, parked cars, etc.
Being close, or even identical, would be great, but its no requirement. You'd need to run the images through a computer and geographic inform. Sure, know where the houses are, and roughly how big, but they dont need to be identical. Using data from nice satalite images would be enough. You'd want it to dynamically generate property, people, parked cars, etc. Being close, or even identical, would be great, but its no requirement. On the routes I'm talking about, most things are wholly or partially covered by trees.
Most of the other roads I'd like to drive are very poorly imaged. The most important things are the roadway, more or less accurate tree. You must mean something like multithreaded graphics.contexts. OpenGL has long supported many contexts drawing to the same surface, each from a different thread. A context cannot be shared between threads, though.
Still not sure what a multithreaded 'context' means, though. Adding a lock around every graphics call is NOT 'multithreading' (actually Microsoft is somewhat better than Unix in this respect, take a look at the horrible way libc added a lock around every single stdio call and thus killed it's. Jesus fuck, PC stands for personal computer, not Windows (hint: Apple commercials lie) Yes, it's possible Jesus fucked. Maybe he was gay and fucked his disciples, maybe he fucked Maria Magdalena, who knows. Apart from that, while it's true that PC is short for personal computer, that doesn't mean that e.g. An office computer owned by the company can't be called a PC.
According to wikipedia.org, IBM applied for a trademark for the term 'Personal Computer' in 1981 (three years after Apple had use. As somebody already said, there is a ww2d.org which uses the same NASA imagery as WW. Also very interesting imho is that the developer of sourceforge.net, the once open-sourced client for GE, switched his code to use the NASA data after slashdot.org. Gaia uses the libsdl.org library and therefore should compile on any system sdl supports (from www.libsdl.org: 'SDL supports Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for.
Slight OT tangent. This reminds me of one of my college professors, who for some reason thought Microsoft could do no wrong. Every day he would come into class and say stuff like, 'I was looking at the first public beta of.NET 3.0 that Microsoft recently released, and I've gotta say, it's pretty slick.' Funny thing, though, he would never expand on what the 'slick' part was. When pressed, he always answered with something about 'metadata improvements' and 'XML', as well as stipulating 'you could go look. I noticed that the kinds of infographic abilities shown here: dynagis.net are now free, as the plugin that provides them is now CC licensed. (more info here: worldwindcentral.com) THAT is pretty cool, actually.
As someone often called on to do design tasks that straddle the line between infographic and visualization, I think I need to give WW another look. I never really considered it once Google Earth came out, because Google Earth was easier for whatever globehopping question I had.
But being able to quickly do this kind of visualization ('uh, hey - we need a picture of the population density of South Dakota, matching our company's color scheme, by tomorrow') should make my life a little easier. World Wind Java (1.5) will come out for public beta before the JavaOne conference in May.
Closed alpha testing and bug fixing will be starting in the next few weeks. The windows version (.net 2.0) is primarily being supported by the open source community since the funding and direction for the NASA World Wind team is towards the Java version. The community does welcome anyone that wants to come in and help at working the code, DX developers would help a lot to get some of the features hammered out more smoothly. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth That's obvious - because GE's goals include things like stability and performance - two things WorldWind noticeably lacks. (Not to mention the horror that is WorldWind's UI.) I just tried V1.4 - and it has the same braindead UI problems that previous versions have suffered. When you grab a point on the globe - you start the globe spinning, rather than as in GE grabbing a 'handle' to position the map.
(And as the rotation speed speed of the globe varies with lag - it's frustrating to position precisely.) When you zoom in - WW loads each and every layer of zoom between the one you start with and where you end up. (This slows rendering (which is glacial to start with) and makes it difficult to reach a precise zoom point and take a goodly amount of time if you change zoom by any significant amount.) Etc. This isn't something for the F/OSS community to be proud of. It was a piece of crap when they took it over - and it's still a piece of crap. When you grab a point on the globe - you start the globe spinning, rather than as in GE grabbing a 'handle' to position the map.
Clicking on a point will move to that location, but dragging works just like it does in GE. Incidentally, you can turn off the clicking behavior and the planet inertia/momentum in the View menu. When you zoom in - WW loads each and every layer of zoom between the one you start with and where you end up.
Which is also exactly what GE does. Google can just afford faster serve. To put it simply - bullshit. When I click and drag in GE, it stops when I release the mouse. When I click and drag in WW it continues to drift. GE does keep spinning, it just has its inertia set much lighter than WW does.
And you can change that in the options if you don't like it. GE does not render each and every layer - let alone load them. GE doesn't use the same level/row/column scheme as WW does, but I don't notice much difference in tile loading time between WW and GE. It seems to use. To put it simply - bullshit.
When I click and drag in GE, it stops when I release the mouse. When I click and drag in WW it continues to drift. Turn the feature OFF then. Sheesh, quit bitching and LOOK at the configuration options. GE does not render each and every layer - let alone load them.
Watching GE load on a modem, I would have to disagree. It takes forever to load tiles. (Zoom down to 100 meters and it is a 15 minute wait to see the spot.) With World Wind I would have to. The previous poster mentioned this as well, but I'll note it clearly: You can change the default behavior of setting the earth moving by turning off Motion Momentum and/or Planet Inertia in the View menu. You can also try turning of Point Go-To to see if that's more to your liking.
In World Wind, like a lot of F/OSS apps, you have options. Take the blinders off, and realize that there are other ways of doing things, and some ways might even be, dare I say it, better. But, if you really like the GE contro. The previous poster mentioned this as well, but I'll note it clearly: You can change the default behavior of setting the earth moving by turning off Motion Momentum and/or Planet Inertia in the View menu.
You can also try turning of Point Go-To to see if that's more to your liking. In World Wind, like a lot of F/OSS apps, you have options. Take the blinders off, and realize that there are other ways of doing things, and some ways might even be, dare I say it, better. When a program, out of the box, behaves i. When a program, out of the box, behaves in a different (and unexpected) way from virtually every other map program out there - it's broken.
It doesn't matter that you can change it. I don't object to options - I object to ill designed UI's. Now that is a ridiculous argument.
Because out of the box, the iPhone behaves in a different (and unexpected) way from virtually every other cell phone out there - it's broken. Because out of the box, the electric light behaves in a different (and unexpected) way from virtually every other light source out there - it's broken. Because out of the box, the iPod behaved in a different (and unexpected) way from virtually every other mp3 player out there at the time - it's broken. Because out of the box, the GU. Your post reminds me of a an argument by a British chap that LHD cars are illogical and that there would be less fatalities on the road if every nation of the world would start driving on the left.
He used the Japan example to prove his point. I am perfectly comfortable driving with the gear stick on the left or the right and I don't get mixed up between break and gas pedal since.
They are exactly in the same order. However I do confess that upon switching from RHD to LHD I have my left hand trying t.
I'm a NWW enthusiast, even if I never really used it on a regular basis. (I'm waiting for the Java version. I hope I won't be deceived). NASA World Wind sadly never had the media coverage GE had. This is kind of sad. People seems to forget, or ignore, that you can't use Google Earth in a work environment.
Well, more precisely, slashgeo.org, not even the Plus version (20$US), you need the Pro (400$US) or the Enterprise version. Why am I underlining this?
Because I believe this should have helped NASA World Wind to capture mind share. Should, because not a lot of people care about that fact and Google will not enforce this, since they benefit from the number of people using it, a little like Microsoft did not care about Windows being copied some centuries ago. Oh, this change in the license came with version 4 of the GE beta, launched last summer. Here's the interesting worldwindcentral.com, on the WW Central website.
Since it will work as an applet, the Java version is probably the best response to MS embedding their 3d map server in an IE browser using ActiveX (or whatever it's called now). This will enable next gen web pages to have really nice controls, and it will all be open source/free data.
That's very exciting. I think the Java naysayers have out of date opinions, JVMs of the past few years are not much trouble to set up and have very good performance. They may use more memory, but if you have a gig in your syste. In 2002 or so I wrote a aolserver extension that pulled DEM data from a database and hardware rendered with opengl with a texture, coverterted the output to png and returned it to the browser as an image. At the time (with what would be very low-end hardware now) it actually performed pretty well and could serve up 100 fps or so from a Nvidia Geforce II card. Aolserver is multithreaded and the tricky part was getting the hardware rendering queueing code stable.
I did a simple html interface for navigation and the response time from the server at 10ms to generate the image was enough that it felt like a static image off a filesystem. This worked really well when there were large amounts of source data in the image and returning the output images was a lot quicker than returning all the source data and rendering on the client. I would think that with today's video hardware it would be possible to have a client that lets the user trace a path across the earth, have the server render all of the sequencial images and create a mpeg-4 video and return it to the client real time. I have all of the C/OpenGL/TCL source from what I did before in a dusty box of CD's marked 'Things I got bored with once I got them to work' if anyone is interested in it. Frameworks are not evil.
Java is not a framework; it's a virtual machine, a language, and a security model. There is no 'runtime versioning mess', only poorly-written or packaged applications (though, Java does make it rather easy to write a poorly-packaged application).
It's quite possible to write an application that works across the 'wide variation in java runtimes', if you know what you're doing. Moving WW to Java is a very good idea, provided the WW devs know what they're doing. Given past experiences.