Wii Remote and World Wind Java

Fabrizio Giudici, a World Wind Java early adopter, reports yet again a Wii remote related demo involving the NASA SDK. The project called Montenav demonstrated by Gianpaolo Melis at the JUG Genova uses the Nintendo hardware to control the WW globe using gestures.

Interfaccia multimodale per WorldWind from Paolo Predonzani on Vimeo.

In the above video the red and green dots are the two hands being tracked simultaneously. Gianpaolo Melis used IR leds attached to his hands to communicate his gestures to a fixed Wii remote.

For more details see Fabrizio Giudici web log.

Last January i reported another project involving Wiimotes and World Wind - the .net version. Recently, j_c_maglio, a WWJ forum member mentioned working on a related project.

OneGeology World Layer for World Wind Java

Did you ever wonder what the Earth would look like if you stripped it of water and vegetation, revealing the underlying rocks?

The OneGeology project aim is to create dynamic digital geological map data for the world. It is an international initiative of the geological surveys of the world who are working together to achieve this ambitious and exciting venture.


Here is a WMS layer for NASA World Wind Java showing the 1:25M Geologic Units for the entire planet, provided by the french BRGM. Download OneGeologyWorldLayer.java, remove the .txt extension and add to the SDK layers.Earth package. Note that this layer is only a coarse 'preview' of the underlying datasets and will not yield much details if you zoom closer.

The OneGeology web site features a 2D map browser - the OneGeology Portal, that allows you to explore in more details the different layers provided by the participating organizations.

The official launch of OneGeology will happen at the 33rd International Geological Congress (IGC) in Oslo, August 6th - 14th 2008.

See this Nature article for an overview of the project.