I recently stumbled on this program and I couldn't think of a group that
might better appreciate this little gem than the folks here. At least
it's photography related...
NASA World Wind is a free program available from the World Wind homepage
at: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ and also via the Sourceforge site at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa-exp/ (as the NASA site is often
very busy).
In brief: It's one of the more "gee whiz" applications I've seen in a
while. Using satellite imagery, USGS aerial photographic data, and an
increasing list of contributions of down-loadable overlays and add-ons
from people all over, it's a customizable "map of the world". Rotate the
globe, zoom in and out, add various sorts of information at will. The
program updates views on-the-fly from many terabytes of information
stored on a number of servers (NASA, USGS, others) to provide a detailed
view that in some areas may resolve as finely as 0.25m
WARNINGS: 1) Requires a recent machine and, most importantly, a good
graphics card which handles 3D computations well, and should probably
not be run if your connection to the world is only dial-up. 2) May cause
you to waste incredible amounts of time "playing".
---
Scott Gomez
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