google earth killer? (worldwind)

Memphis said:
I don't mean this in any bad way, but WorldWind has been around for ages now and one of the prominant members (possibly a mod?) pimps it a fair bit.
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fair play, did a quick search didn't find any threads dedicated to it, :D
 
For me I don#'t like it. From a very high altitude, the arth looks more real than Google Earth's earth, but when you zoom in it doens't feel right and when you zoom in on Google earth the amount of coverege is awesome. I also think Google Earth is so simple to use.
 
Boo! If prominant member means dirty spammer, you're right :D

World Wind is aimed at different people to GE.

My theory is that Google saw people's reaction to World Wind and thought "hey, we can do that...ooh, let's buy Keyhole which has lots of high-res stuff to make people love us more" :p

GE generally lets you zoom in further ($$$++++) but WW has far superior US coverage than GE and a few other places around the world and is also open source so it's a lot more extensible, and lots of organisations (including NATO and various US agencies) use it for various things, of which I've only seen unclassified screenshots :(

World Wind also has more planets than GE (remember Google Moon/Mars? WW had that, well, ages before Google....there's also add-ons for Saturn/Venus/etc.)

World Wind has more scientific data and so on, and lots more types of Landsat7 data which Google doesn't. That doesn't please the "but I can't see my house" group, ie average Joe, but hey :p

Talking of London....not at the *moment* - there's only 15meter coverage of the UK (Landsat7). But we have a deal (in principle) with a UK firm for 2 metre imagery (ie 'you can just see your house') of the whole UK. Now we're working out the technical/legal side of things...

The funny thing is that we're taking part in Google's Summer of Code which means that Google is paying us/people to develop World Wind!

World Wind has been around for ages, as has Keyhole (now GE). I dunno which was around first, but I know that neither are unique - they're just more general-public-friendly versions of GIS/imagery applications, which is a huuge field :)

If you're bored of Earth try Celestia, pretty much the same thing but in space - very neat program.

pics are slow as even on my 10meg con though.
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Which layer are you looking at? The USGS ones are ok most of the time (they're run by MS), the Landsat datasets should be speedy all the time, and the ZoomIt layers should be speedy too.

As for WW's zooming in / usability....I much prefer it to GE. There's some options you can fiddle with to mess with the planet inertia / momentum etc, too.

Edit: and you bet, the Earth is far better from a high resoltion because World Wind uses the stunning Next-Generation Blue Marble which has a different view for each month. It's twice the resoltion of the original famous blue marble and includes relief shading, etc. Google just doesn't bother with Blue Marble/Landsat7 because, well, they'll be making their money from ads shown at street-level.
 
Forgot to mention in my other post, there's a summary of the recent new features here.
Energize said:
Used worldwind, was afull, slow, and didnt have any close up footage other than america it seems.
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It's weird, I've never found it that slow - the only slow part is when you have lots going on on-screen because it's essentially a 3D game and you need a powerful system.

Course, you can always turn off stuff like the elevation and untick the datasets you're not viewing.

The imagery downloading needs optimising too, it decides not to download what you're looking at sometimes....any C# devs around? ;)
 
Energize said:
It was the downloading that was slow. Zoomed in and it took ages to load the images.
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Probably because it was downloading outside of the viewable area. v1.3.5 should be more optimized, I think.

There's also another weird thing where somtimes it decides to do 'nothing' for aaaaages....like it's gone to sleep.
 
Not that i want to pimp my own industry but in the next few months we'll be seeing the beta public release of ArcGIS explorer

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer/index.html

which since its made by the worlds number 1 computer mapping company should be something special.

it features imagery layers like GE and WW, but its allows layers to be imported from web services such as the geography network, allowing potentially thousands of maps to be created, from 3D flood mapping of the nile, to the best spots to view the grand canyon from.

got a lot of potential, i'm sure i'll be pimping it up more when its released ;) plus its not aimed at advertising like GE, so it wont be telling you where the nearest hotel is all the time.

the screenshots look pretty good. i particularly like this before and after shot of katrina...

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer/graphics/explorer3_lg.jpg
 
ESRI are doing really well with ArcGIS, I can't wait to use it :)

chimaera said:
it features imagery layers like GE and WW, but its allows layers to be imported from web services such as the geography network, allowing potentially thousands of maps to be created, from 3D flood mapping of the nile, to the best spots to view the grand canyon from.

got a lot of potential, i'm sure i'll be pimping it up more when its released ;) plus its not aimed at advertising like GE, so it wont be telling you where the nearest hotel is all the time.

the screenshots look pretty good. i particularly like this before and after shot of katrina...

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer/graphics/explorer3_lg.jpg
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WW and GE both have refreshable 'network layers' and 'network kml' support now so I'd guess that ArcGIS Explorer will have full GML support? WW is working towards that, too, and creating its own standard, WWML (madness but should encompass GML/KML and more.)

The compare feature of ArcGIS is really neat - WW should have that. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes coding by any C# dev :)

The data shown there came about through a joint effort of the GIS community which involved people from Telascience, the NOAA and USNG, and was hosted by the World Wind community (Worldwindcentral.com). The rescue teams had the imagery and were using it to save lives. Really neat stuff :)
 
I hope it has GML support, its still in closed beta although i know it already has KML integration. The big one for me is that it will support 2d as well as 3d data, so we can load it onto every pc at work for nothing, and then stream ArcIMS web services straight into it.

Functionality isn't great compared to ArcGIS but then again most people dont need £2000's worth of license to look at a few maps. WW and GE have really opened up the industry to the public, all this free aerial photography and satellite imagery had a few data vendors squirming, if only OS took note and made their digital data a bit cheaper :(

I didn't actually realise WW had so many extras you can bolt on, i got bored of GE as i just use ArcGIS for similar purposes but i'm gonna have to give WW a go.

Oh if you ever do get to work with any ESRI products i would heartily recommend their 'tech development' events, great food and freebies :D
 
Oooh we musn't forget Microsoft!

They're allowing us to create a Virtual Earth plugin and use VE data/maps/etc which absolutely, totally rocks. And they have some deals with some imagery providers for non-US data in the pipeline (last I heard) too.....they'll be taking on Google Earth pretty soon, and WW will (so far at least) be able to use that lovely high-res data too :D
 
All I do is administrate the community forums and Wiki as well as sit on the board of the governing/owning non-profit, I don't develop or work for NASA etc....though a bunch of us did get a really nice engraved crystal cube as a thank you from NASA...and I got two because those silly rocket scientists spelt my name wrong :D
 
Hah! Don't listen to me, I don't know jack - look at this website - the latest release of World Wind adds this in as an evaluation layer.

The imagery is horribly slow to download at the moment and it's got big watermarks on it *but* it's high-res imagery and it covers a lot of places!

World Wind > Layer manager > Imagery > Evaluation data > GlobeXplorer.

Whoo!
 
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