NASA World Wind 1.3 Satelite Imaging software

Download & Information Url: worldwind.arc.nasa.gov...

This is a nice app from NASA developed and distributed on the Sourceforge system.

It alows you to zoom in all over the world, up to levels that currently equal about 3de or 4th best zoom you get on googlemaps. This is subjected to improvement in the future as Nasa is still running most of the global satelite images of low resource servers.

The application is mainly special because it doesn't only let you navigate the globe in 3D, but it also displays topology all around the world in 3D.

This means that if your, for instance, in Las Vegas and pan the camera to a more horizontal position to the surface, you'll actualy see the mountains and relief of the area in full 3D.

The system installs the 3D engine and base maps of the entire world, together with information like nations, borders, places of interests and some other tidbits.

But while zooming into a specific area, the application downloads satelite images from NASA and other selectable satelite stores to give you a better detail of the area.

Google's maps are better for america, but when your dealing with the rest of the world, there are no high detail images at all. While with this one you can navigate all over the world, even Easter Island and all of New Zealand.

Another great set of features about this app is that it alows you to replay all seismic events from 1980 to today on the virtual globe. Including the great Tsunami of Boxingday 2004.

Then there is also a bulkload of plugins in the application that alow you to see population density's, rainfall, clouds and pritty much everything else you could think of.
This application shows great promise to bring a full 3D view of the world together with a great wealth of information to the public at a relativly low system requirement.

Its worth to try out, but don't expect just yet to zoom into your backyard. Although you can, for the entire planet, zoom into levels that you can make out every single street in the world.

thanks for the info.

Great program.

Fantastic software!!
Great find dude..very cool

Its pritty great, the potential this application has.

Its capable of taking data out of XML feeds, so you could expect that 3de party or NASA themselves might create plugins where you can track aircraft, check weather in realtime, heck, if some UFO site takes its job serious, they could convert every recorded UFO sighting by type(disk, lights, unknown, triangle ...) and other data for everyone to see in realtime.

This app has so much potential it almost makes my mouth water.

Yeah I have it too... I can even see my hometown with hte programm... IT's really good...

Was passed a link to World Wind by a friend at work yesterday.......

Incredible bit of software, even more so in the fact that it is FREE.

System Requirements
Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, or XP
Intel Pentium 3, 1 GHz, or AMD Athlon or higher
256 MB of RAM
DSL / Cable connection or faster
2 GB of disk space

3D Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra, ATI Radeon 7500, Intel Extreme Graphics 2 or better.

Highly recommended....

I've had this program for a while, I love it!

This thing has already been posted a long time ago... Nice that you still made this post...

UUps... this was the post...

[edit on 5-7-2005 by Figher Master FIN]

Thanks. I haven't seen this yet. Using it kinda reminds me of Orbiter.

just to let you know you can also download (for free) google's earth viewer (previously known as Keyhole before they bought it) if you dont fancy viewing images through their web page.

earth.google.com...