Nasa World Wind Virtual Earth Plugin

Is open-source software, developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that allows you to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data, World Wind lets you experience any part of earth's terrain in visually rich 3D form, just as if you were really there. For instance, you can use World Wind to zoom in on the Himalayas or Mount Saint Helens, as shown in Figure 1.

This plug-in adds multitouch support to NASA World Wind. A basic set of gestures is implemented in this plug-in. By using a pinching gesture, the user can. Microsoft word 2010 free download.

The combination of Landsat 7 imagery with SRTM data allows World Wind to display dramatic views of the earth at eye level. Users can literally fly across the world in any direction. As fun as World Wind is to play with, that is not its purpose. Instead, World Wind is a Java technology component that you can integrate into your applications to incorporate 3D earth modeling. World Wind does all the hard work for you, such as dynamic image selection and retrieval for images of the earth's topography.

In addition, because the software is open source and written in the Java programming language, you can build into the NASA World Wind Java 3D visualization technology. You are also free to extend or embed the component architecture for business, research, or education. The possibilities for portable, high-performance 3D graphics rendering are wide open.

NASA World Wind visualization technology is not just cool software. Instead, it is a component that can be included in any application or applet that needs access to NASA's world data and imagery.

In addition, NASA has partnered with several organizations that also provide valuable data that you can use. World Wind has tremendous potential in science applications, educational software, and business and government use. World Wind is not a copy of, nor is it in competition with that software. Both NASA World Wind and Google Earth are sophisticated programs with amazing feature sets, and each has features that the other would benefit from.

Despite how similar the programs seem, they differ significantly in focus, development history, and philosophy. Many people use both programs, depending on what they wish to accomplish.

Google Earth is great for looking up any location on earth, and viewing earth data in different ways. But with World Wind, you can incorporate the component into your application to bring together your own data with data from other companies, or to use NASA data in new and innovative ways. For instance, World Wind can be use to create flight simulators, using earth or other planets, or it can be used to view data on specific diseases worldwide. In addition, World Wind is not limited to information about the earth. In fact, you can use this component and modules to view the moon and other planets, or to look out into the universe, as shown in Figure 2. Because it was written to be extensible and replaceable, you can conform World Wind to whatever your needs are, and it will deal with complex and difficult image manipulation and handling.

World Wind also includes a myriad of advanced functions and capabilities. In addition, World Wind benefits from diverse input from the open-source user community, which has the power to shape its development.

This has led to a proliferation of. NASA has released World Wind, written in the Java programming language, to improve its quality through peer review, maximize public awareness and the impact of NASA research, and increase dissemination of World Wind. You can deploy World Wind within an application with, or you can deploy it as an applet through the browser.

World Wind has eight packages, and more will be available in the future: • gov.nasa.worldwind -- The top-level world wind package. • gov.nasa.worldwind.awt -- Classes specific to use with Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). • gov.nasa.worldwind.formats.gpx and gov.nasa.worldwind.formats.nmea -- Both are classes specific to GPS track formats. • gov.nasa.worldwind.geom -- Geometry and math classes. • gov.nasa.worldwind.globes -- Globes with earth, Mars, and so forth. • gov.nasa.worldwind.layers -- Imagery and other data to display on globes.