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Comparing 3D Earth Viewers

posted by lxnyce on Tuesday October 16, @02:11PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us

A colleage sent along this article from gim-international comparing 3D viewers. It may be interesting to some. Here is the summary : "A 3D-Earth viewer enables navigating through the virtual environment and can be easily downloaded from the internet. How might this rapid development support steady, long-term development of institutions such as Rijkswaterstaat, the roads and water regulatory authority of the Netherlands? The authors consider and compare three standard 3D-Earth viewers: Google Earth, MSN Virtual Earth 3D and NASA’s World Wind. Each is combined with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Services to examine their performance in disseminating geo-information to the general public. While Google Earth proves technically superior, other aspects must also be considered. "/i

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Industry: NASA World Wind Java SDK 0.3 Released [+]

The Earth is Square informs us NASA World Wind Java SDK 0.3 has been released. This Pat Murris blog entry provides numerous screenshots and an analysis of what's new. The Bull's Rambles blog reminds us this is truly a cross-platform virtual globe and links to the Java webstart app. Amongst the changes from EiS: "# - Memory cache refactoring and optimization # - Reimplementation of Polylines. Polylines on surface. # - Shape and icon dragging # - Math classes re-engineering # - WMS capabilities doc parsing # - Texture cache # - Proxy support # - Anaglyph stereo "

• A poor comparison

  (Score:1, Insightful)

  by Anonymous Voxel on Wednesday October 17, @09:12AM (#1868)

  Well... this is a very poor comparison. The authors talk about WMS Browser which isn't the only way of accessing WMS servers in World Wind. What's more it isn't the best way either...
  Data from WMS can be used as a regular layer (after importing via 'Import layer from WMS' function) without all those mentioned issues (static tiles vs dynamic bounding box, layer management, number of displayed layers, etc.).
  I think someone should learn how to use a software before writing such "comparisons" ;)

  [ Reply to This ]
• Not a full comparison?

  (Score:3, Informative)

  by hipifreq (1291) on Thursday October 18, @06:40PM (#1873)

  This really isn't much of a comparison of the 3-D viewers. They're only topic was how each of them handled WMS data, and nothing about the look/feel of the software. I haven't had the inclination to try out MS VE, but GE and WW are both very useful tools. I tend to use GE for road maps and the close-up imagery. The 3-D terrain is really quite simplistic, although still quite useful. I love the way World Wind feels for moving around the globe, especially when momentum is turned on. I find it a more intuitive interface than GE. The sun shading and atmospheric effects make it great for visualizations, although the default imagery isn't all that great.

  --
  Because everyone needs a freqie hippie

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