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...

Geosignal French maps in WWJ

Toulouse based Geosignal has made freely available for more than a year a number of interesting layers on their WMS server. Here is a layer class for WorldWind Java that will bring together eight levels of details from the RASTER maps serie.


Download GeosignalRasterWMSLayer.java, remove the .txt extension and add to the SDK layers.Earth package.


The layer covers continental France and Corsica. The finest levels include street maps for most urban areas.

French geology layer for WWJ

Here is a WMS layer to get access to the french BRGM geology maps in WWJ.


Download BRGMGeologyLayer.java and add it to the worldwind.layers.earth package, after removing the .txt extension. In BasicDemo add the layer on top of I3 Landsat, like the USGS layers. It will start to show tiles under 100km altitude.

This layer was already accessible through the WWXMLLayer code i posted last may, but some major refactoring have occured inside the SDK since then and i havent migrated the code yet.

Text and messages translation in WWJ

In the WWJ SDK you may have noticed a file named MessageStrings.properties and several others named the same but with an extra two characters country code like de, ja,or zh. These are simple text files that contain all the constant character strings for one language. WWJ will use the one that has the same country code as your computer settings.


To have WWJ 'speak' your tongue, just make a copy of the default english file - the only one that contains all the messages, and name it MessageStrings_xx.properties, xx being your country code. Then translate the messages you want and delete all the others. You dont need to have all the messages translated in your file, the missing ones will fall back to english.

Note that special characters must be specified as Unicode hexadecimal numbers (eg. \u00c9 for 'É').

Here is a portion of a french property file with translated layer names. Get MessageStrings_fr.properties, and after removing the .txt extension, place it with the other MessageStrings files. Run one of the demo or example applications.

Also note that this doesnt translate the placenames...

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

Géoportail en 3D avec ombrage

J'ai ajouté le support de l'ombrage dans le Plugin Géoportail pour NASA World Wind 1.4 :

Le rendu de certaines couches topographiques (Scan) s'en trouve nettement amélioré.

Pour en savoir plus, voir la discussion sur le forum World Wind.

Lever de soleil sur le Mont Vinaigrier

Depuis ce matin de janvier à Nice, je me dis que ce lever de soleil ferait un beau fond d'écran... c'est chose faite dans la galerie photo de So... Nice, avec des versions pour écrans 4/3 et 16/10 (larges).

Alpes Maritimes Aérien en stéréo anaglyphe

Au mois de janvier dernier, j'ai eue la chance de survoler les Alpes Maritimes lors d'un trajet Nice-Londres, par temps clair... avec le bon hublo, du bon côté de l'avion et un appareil numérique.

Grace au déplacement de l'avion, des images prises à deux ou trois secondes d'interval produisent naturellement des paires stéréoscopiques.

Voici une dizaine de vues commentées des Alpes montées en anaglyphes.