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!