Worldwind - cool-looking NASA globe thingy

[GNEP]

http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/features.html

World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there.
...
World Wind comes with a certain amount of data you can zoom into. After a certain point, World Wind will begin to download more images automatically. At this point, your Internet connection can make a big difference.

Downloading it now. 260megs or so, but getting reasonable rates from here:
ftp://geo.arc.nasa.gov/pub/worldwind/

Looks interesting!

[Paddy]

very cool!
Coming down at 36kB/s... perhaps I shouldn't have used the same url as you GNEP

[Technoid]

bleh, it requires .net

[Paddy]

Luddite

[Paddy]

from reading the forums it appears that you can increase th elevel of detail for city maps...

under \configuration
is the file worldlayers.xml
Search inside for the line :
<Name>USGS Urban Area Ortho-Imagery</Name>
a little further down is the line:
<NumberLevels>8</NumberLevels>
Change the 8 to 10, and it will download 2 further levels of detail while zooming when using the high res version of the USGS data (the colour areal photographs).
With this setting, a parking car has about 10*20 pixels, so you can tell apart a pickup from a van, ect.

[agallag]

bah, downloaded the whole thing from your link, and the zip file is corrupt

[Paddy]

On similar lines...

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

[Paddy]

agallag: Cheers - I've changed download links.

[Jon P. Inghram]

They're having problems with the LandSat server, getting slashdotted was more than it could handle.

[GT98]

I just downloaded it and its friggen cool.

[agallag]

Okay, got it correctly this time. Time to install...

[Paddy]

very cool - althogh I can't get it to connect to server

[Jon P. Inghram]

Originally posted by Paddy
very cool - althogh I can't get it to connect to server

See above.

[Paddy]

It connects for the Animated Earth and USGS1M maps.. but nothing else... i guess their swamped.

[Paddy]

does USGS = US Geological Survey?