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

Braunschweig University of Technology Braunschweig () or Brunswick ( , from Low German ''Brunswiek'' , Braunschweig dialect: ''Bronswiek'') is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the No ...

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

Keyhole, Inc Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data onto a 3D globe, allowing users ...

and changed their product into

Google Earth Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...

. 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 agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

USGS The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, a ...

, the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

and the city of

Osnabrück Osnabrück (; wep, Ossenbrügge; archaic ''Osnaburg'') is a city in the German state of Lower Saxony. 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 ...

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

Low-pressure area In meteorology, a low-pressure area, low area or low is a region where the atmospheric pressure is lower than that of surrounding locations. Low-pressure areas are commonly associated with inclement weather (such as cloudy, windy, with possible ...

anticyclone An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon defined as a large-scale circulation of winds around a central region of high atmospheric pressure, clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere as viewed from abov ...

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 Java OpenGL (JOGL) is a wrapper library that allows OpenGL to be used in the Java programming language. It was originally developed by Kenneth Bradley Russell and Christopher John Kline, and was further developed by the Sun Microsystems Game Techn ...

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 (https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/), "WorldWind is a ...

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

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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