First World Wind Java Applet and integration

While i was deep into details of the WWJ code, some very interesting things happened from several european users : the first WWJ applet from Toulouse, France and a very nice integration into blueMarine, an open source photo workflow application from Milano, Italy (not very far apart...).

First World Wind Java Applet

Stéphane Maldini (aka pred) and Nicolas Castel (aka vash), two WWJ forum contributors, have made steady progress at bringing WWJ into a browser and recently posted a link to this WWJ applet page.


Beware that it can take a little while to load (probably 5 to 10 MB) and it may ask you some unexpected questions about your Java configuration. I'm not sure it flowlessly works across platforms yet.

This demo includes a GeoRSS stream reader that displays recent earthquakes icons with actives links to the appropriate web pages. According to pred, this applet is part of an online GeoRSS editor project... More screenshots on Chad's The Earth Is Square blog.

WWJ integration into blueMarine

Since the may release of WWJ, Fabrizio Giudici, one of the author of blueMarine, has been very active at embedding it into his application to offer a 3D perspective on geo-referenced photo sessions.


The result is quite beautiful. Well done Fabrizio!

Fête de la Saint-Jean 2007 sur Waverly

Encore une magnifique journée - et soirée, de la Saint-Jean cette année. Le 'comité' de la rue Waverly (entre Fairmount et Saint-Viateur) a encore une fois obtenu de la ville de Montréal l'usage exclusivement piéton de notre bout de rue pendant douze heures (faut pas exagerer non plus).


Tables à picnique, sofas et mobilier de salon ont ainsi pris possession de l'asphalte dimanche dernier pour le plus grand bonheur des riverains et de leurs enfants.

La journée s'est terminée sur les rythmes latins du 'band' invité pour l'occasion, ainsi que des percussions brésiliennes de notre fanfare locale.


Désolé, les photos ne font pas justice à l'ambiance de la fin de journée ou beaucoups de monde dansait au milieu de la rue ;)

Réflexions sur le Lac Castor

Un magnifique camping 'à la canadienne' avec un superbe lac entourés de collines et de forêts. Tente ou petit bungalow, baignade, canoë et feu de camp le soir...


Aux berges du Lac Castor, à une heure et demi de Montréal.

Adding a simple world map overlay to WWJ

Here is a simple 'You are here' world map overlay layer for WWJ. It displays a crosshair over the current view location and behaves like the Compass layer.


Download Earth_Map.png in your SDK bin/images (where the compass bitmap is), then add WorldMapLayer.java to the worldwinddemo package or your application - remove the .txt extension first.

Once done, add this layer to WWJ in the same way as the compass layer.

Nice vue depuis la navette spatiale

Le Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth a deux nouvelles photographies de Nice et de la Baie des Anges, prises le 26 février 2007 à 341 Km d'altitude.


> Nice et la Baie de Anges
> Nice et le Cap Ferrat

Growing box like structures inside WWJ

As i was working on some aspects of SurfaceShape(s) and Polyline(s) in the WWJ SDK, i came to try out the 'filled' option for polylines - which could allow to make non textured 3D models. Here is a simple method to draw boxes on the globe.


Cut and paste this code into the AWT1Up demo application to reproduce the above example.

This is probably not the right way to build entire cities... but it can certainly help to be able to build some simple 3D structures with a handfull of filled polylines.

See this WWJ forum thread for discussion.

Adding a simple scalebar to WWJ

Here is a simple scalebar layer for WWJ. It can display metric and imperial units and behaves like the Compass layer.


Download ScalebarLayer.java (9k). Remove the .txt extension and add it to the worldwinddemo package or your own project.

See this WWJ forum thread for discussion.

Loading WW layersets structure into WWJ

Following on my previous steps at loading World Wind existing layersets into WWJ, i moved one step further with more generic WWConfigLoader and LayerSet classes. Together they can read whole layersets hierarchy from WW XML config files and produce the appropriate objects to feed a JTree.


Download WWJ_WWConfigLoader_01.zip (50k) and follow instructions in the readme.txt.

In addition, the new LayerSet object can compute the list of 'active' layers to set the current Model LayerList each time a layer state changes in the tree.

Selection and deselection of layers in the JTree is not done yet. Some checkboxes are needed here... this is a work in progress and some part of this code may become obsolete with future release of the WWJ SDK.

See this thread in the WWJ forum for discussion.

Adding single image layers to WWJ

One thing that is missing in the actual WWJ early release 0.2 is an easy mean to apply a single image over the globe. Here is a first atempt at a renderable SurfaceImage class. The screenshot shows the Geo RSS icon pasted over part of Europe.


Download WWJ_SurfaceImage_01.zip (3k) and follow instructions in the readme.txt to reproduce the above.

One image can be applied to the whole globe too. Here is an example of the code to make a RenderableLayer with one full sphere SurfaceImage :

private RenderableLayer makeImageLayer() {
  RenderableLayer layer = new RenderableLayer();
  layer.setName("Night Lights SurfaceImage layer");
  layer.setPickEnabled(false);
  layer.addRenderable(new SurfaceImage("earthlights1k.jpg",
     Sector.FULL_SPHERE));
  return layer;
}

However, this version - and OGL, does only handle images with size being a power of two (16, 32, 64... 1024, 2048...). Images with other sizes will show a black padding - up to the next power of two. And only the lat/lon projection is supported.

See this WWJ forum thread for discussion.

The Earth Lights image comes from James Hastings-Trew Planetary Pixel Emporium. There are also some nice global earth maps at the original Blue Marble page.