Earth3D was developed as part of a diploma thesis of Dominique Andre Gunia at

Braunschweig University of Technology TU Braunschweig (, unofficially ''University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology'') is the oldest ' (comparable to an institute of technology in the American system) in Germany. It was founded in 1745 as Collegium Carolinum and is a membe ...

to display a virtual globe of the earth. It was developed before Google bought

Keyhole, Inc Google Earth is a web mapping, web and computer program created by Google that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satelli ...

and changed their product into

Google Earth Google Earth is a web mapping, web and computer program created by Google that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satelli ...

. 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 A quadtree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly four children. Quadtrees are the two-dimensional analog of octrees and are most often used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into four ...

. It uses data from

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

USGS The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an government agency, agency of the United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geograp ...

, the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...

and the city of

Osnabrück Osnabrück (; ; archaic English: ''Osnaburg'') is a city in Lower Saxony in western Germany. It is situated on the river Hase in a valley penned between the Wiehen Hills and the northern tip of the Teutoburg Forest. With a population of 168 ...

. One of the strengths of Earth3D is the capacity of showing meteorological phenomena, like

Low-pressure area In meteorology, a low-pressure area (LPA), low area or low is a region where the atmospheric pressure is lower than that of surrounding locations. It is the opposite of a high-pressure area. Low-pressure areas are commonly associated with incle ...

anticyclone A high-pressure area, high, or anticyclone, is an area near the surface of a planet where the atmospheric pressure is greater than the pressure in the surrounding regions. Highs are middle-scale meteorological features that result from interpl ...

s, etc. in near-real time.http://www.cuadernalia.net/spip.php?article4255 Earth3D (Visor interactivo 2D, 2.5D y 3D para Andalucía) The original version of Earth3D was developed using Trolltech's QT framework. Later a version built with Java and JOGL was developed.http://www.earth3d.org/ Welcome to Earth3D But the demand for a Java-based version was very little. This may be because NASA's

WorldWind NASA WorldWind is an open-source software, open-source (released under the NASA Open Source Agreement, NOSA license and the Apache 2.0 license) virtual globe. According to the website, "WorldWind is an open source virtual globe API. Wo ...

also has 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 own visualizations to it. All these three projects can be retrieved from SourceForge's CVS (C++) or Subversion (Java) repository.

References

External links

*
World 3D Maps Earth
Free software programmed in C++ Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Virtual globes Programming tools for Windows MacOS programming tools {{science-software-stub

See also

References

External links