Earth3D
Software that enables a real time 3D view of the Earth
Earth3D was developed as part of a diploma thesis of Dominique Andre Gunia at Braunschweig University of Technology to display a virtual globe of the earth. It was developed before Google bought Keyhole, Inc and changed their product into Google Earth. Earth3D downloads its data (satellite imagery and height data) from a server while the user navigates around. The data itself is saved in a Quadtree. It uses data from NASA, USGS, the CIA and the city of Osnabrück.
One of the strengths of Earth3D is the capacity of showing meteorological phenomena, like low-pressure areas, anticyclones, etc. in near-real time.
The original version of Earth3D was developed using Trolltech's QT framework. Later a version built with Java and JOGL was developed, but the demand for a Java-based version was very low. This may be because NASA's WorldWind also had an open source Java version, so most people wanted to use a C++ based globe in their applications. That was the reason why a minimalized version, the Earth3dlib, was developed. It contains only the most necessary functions to display the earth itself and to add one's own visualizations to it.
All these three projects can be retrieved from SourceForge's CVS (C++) or Subversion (Java) repository.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Earth3D”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Earth3d.jpg by Dominique Andre Gunia, CC BY-SA 3.0
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