360: Saint Etienne de Tinée, France 06 - my first 360 shot...

I recently received my first 360 camera, a Xiaomi Mijia 360 and this is my very first shot. Nothing to brag about really. I'm just getting acquainted with this new 360/VR tools. It's been a long way since the first QuickTime VRs.

The picture was taken yesterday in front of my house in the heart of Saint Etienne de Tinée (1150m) in the Maritime Alps, France, where i spend the summer.




The Image quality is somewhat OK for the price... i wish it would be sharper. But it is quite stunning to be able to snap a 360 panorama in one shot, process it and publish it full screen so easily.

To be followed...

World Wind JAVA SDK posts are back online

I have to apologize for all the broken links in my WWJ related post lately.

I failed to renew the domain name under which i was hosting most of my NASA World Wind related work and some domain name squatter took it over... Long story short, i transferred everything to my other domain name but had to edit a lot of links and references.

Most of everything is certainly dated or integrated into the SDK though... But i hope some things may still be interesting or useful to someone, so there it is, back online. ;-)

World Wind Java SDK Web Site

All you want to know about the World Wind Java SDK is here:
http://goworldwind.org/

World Wind Java SDK 1.2 Announcement

From the WWJ SDK Developement team:

"On Tuesday July 19th, 2011 we are releasing World Wind 1.2. Please join us that day for the webinar, where we'll describe the release contents and the new resources available to help and guide World Wind developers. We'll also discuss World Wind's near-term road map. There are sessions for American and European time zones, There are only 100 spaces available per session, so sign up soon, but please don't sign up if you are unlikely to attend.

Register for a session now by clicking a date below:

Tue, Jul 19, 2011 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM CEST
Tue, Jul 19, 2011 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM PDT

Once registered you will receive an email confirming your registration with information you need to join the Webinar."

French Geoportal's layers published using NASA World Wind

Nice surprise today, the French Geoportail is publishing it's layers content via a new World Wind Java application available online.

Some screenshots:

France map

Paris area

Topo maps over Mercantour National Park

Roads, shoreline and buildings over aerial imagery

Colored DTMs - French Riviera and the Alps

I was secretly hopping this to happen and i'm very pleased to see the move has taken place so soon. However, it is still unclear whether the actual Geoportail 3D client using Skyline TerraExplorer will be replaced with a Java version using WWJ...

Textured Wall for World Wind Java

Following up on a WWJ Forum post regarding a 'vertical image' to display atmospheric data, i quickly put together a simple renderable that will draw an image on a plane perpendicular to the globe surface.


Download TexturedWall.java - remove the .txt extension and save in the SDK render package.

Nothing fancy, really, a texture rendered over a quad - it will not 'curve' around the globe on long distances. The quad is defined with two LatLon locations, a bottom and a top altitude. It is also an example of a simple renderable using OGL primitives that may serve as a base template for more sophisticated objects.

NASA Software Of The Year 2009 Plaque

Happy 2010 to you all! - and plenty of virtual globes!

Sorry for posting so little lately... the World Wind Java SDK is keeping the team very busy. I also lost my father last summer.

I should certainly post a review of what has changed in the WWJ SDK since the nightly builds and 0.6 have been made available (was it last March?!) and i'm hopping to do that soon.

In the mean time i'm proud to show you the beautiful plaque i received from NASA, almost for Christmas. It is surprisingly heavy!

World Wind Java selected for the 2009 NASA Software Of The Year Award

The NASA Software Advisory Panel has selected the World Wind Java SDK for the 2009 NASA Software Of The Year Award.


See this World Wind Forum post for the announcement by Project Manager Patrick Hogan at Ames Research Center.

This is great news for the free and open source project which will certainly receive increased attention from the other departments of the space agency - and beyond. World Wind was initiated by NASA Learning Technologies in 2002.

Sunlight package for WorldWind Java

Here is the very first iteration of a sun light package for NASA WorldWind Java. It includes a custom tessellator for terrain shading, an atmospheric scattering based sky layer, a sun position calculator and a lens flare effect. Some of the code has been contributed by WWJ Forum member Michael de Hoog aka Omega.

Terrain shading

Download the sunlight package (Zip 33K). Unzip in the SDK examples package and run the sunlight.SunShading.java demo application.

Lens flare and atmospheric scattering

The demo application code will show you how to use the different components. Although this initial version works rather well, you may notice a couple issues. Dark or bright bands may show across the terrain in some places. The atmospheric scattering code is not optimal. It fails to produce a blue sky at ground level and the sky underlying geometry is too coarse to produce nice and smooth sunsets. The sun calculator reported position does not seem right either.

Sun occlusion

Enjoy!

WorldWind Java 0.6 Source available

Access to the daily NASA WorldWind Java SDK 0.6 source code has been made public from the NASA WWJ build site. You will find the announcement and change list in this WWJ Forum post.

So much has been going into the SDK since the 0.5 release in May 2008 it is hard to sort out what the most notable changes and additions are. Here are a number of new features that come to mind.

Airspace volumes

Airspace builder

You will find a new render.airspace package you can see at work with the examples.Airspaces application. It includes a number of geometric volumes that can follow the terrain. It's main application is to visualize 'air spaces' but there is no doubt it will serve many other purposes. Be sure to have a look at the AirspaceBuilder that allows you to create and edit 3D polygons and spheres.

On-screen layer manager, status bar and view controls

There are a couple new on-screen layers that replace the status bar and layer manager SWING version and offer control over the view. All the 2D layers have now a 'location offset' property that let you fine tune their screen placement.

Contour lines

The default tessellator has been augmented with intersection code for line and elevation against the current terrain geometry. This allows to cast rays or compute contour lines that you can see at work in the examples.ContourLines.

Rubber sheet images

At a lot of work has been done on data import and image processing. There is code to import, manipulate, tile, stitch and transform imagery. You will find surface textures you can stretch and warp with the examples.RubberSheetImage application.

The icon layer and renderer can now use absolute elevations and will perform horizon and view frustum clipping if set to do so. This should help handle larger icon populations.

Work has been done to allow several elevation models and data sources to be compounded.

Length and area measure tools

Interactive length and area measure tools have been added - see examples.MeasureToolUsage and util.measure package.

Tiled image layers can now use mipmaps and produce a cleaner terrain rendering without 'shimmering' in the distance. Image blending has been fixed and should allow proper application of semi opaque layers without the 'black edges' we have seen before. However this change had the fog produce 'white edges' so it has been dropped for now - the fog layer.

The applet package has been updated to take advantage of the latest Sun Next Generation Java plugin - more stable and flexible.

Multimedia annotations

A new examples.util package contains a couple useful tools like a browser launcher, an image viewer, an audio player or a slide viewer.

The view sensitivity can now be set. The TerrainProfileLayer can now follow a path. Track markers have been reworked and have now extended and more flexible capabilities. The FlatWorld example has been updated with code to switch from round to flat globe. The place name layer has been enhanced. Web Service Catalog support has been implemented - see applications.gio. There is code to convert WW.net cache...

Many bugs have been fixed, often in response to comments from the World Wind Java Forum users. Thank you all.

More screenshots dating back to October 2008 can be found here.

For all migration related issues, questions and comments, please use this WWJ Forum thread.