Another school that is leveraging World Wind Java for a project is the International Space University.  This project consists of a group 40 students with different backgrounds ranging from satellite applications to policy and law.

The team project is described as disaster risk management (DRM) and the mission statement is to extend the current capabilities of CAPRA (Comprehensive Approach for Probabilistic Risk Assessment) using both space and ground based technologies to evaluate risk, minimize vulnerability, and mitigate the adverse effects of disasters in Central America.

This summer there are three Programming Camps being held at the iD Programming Academy at Stanford University. These camps are for 13 to 18 year olds and focuses on the Java language and NASA World Wind.

One group had to build a computerized version of Risk, to be played on the World Wind globe, while another group created a program allowing users to personalize World Wind maps by labelling points of interest and mapping routes. A third group had to figure out a way to use a Wii Fit Balance Board to move across the World Wind globe — users stand on the board and lean forward to go forward, sideways to go sideways, essentially flying over the Earth.

I have already shown a video of the WWJava Risk Game.  Which is quite amazing.

Great work for a bunch of kids.

Right now lets play a game of Global Thermonuclear War (WarGames if you didn’t guess).

Here is Risk being played on a Multi-Touch wall using WWJava:

Coming through the grapevine, I have learned of RATMAN which is a virtual globe that looks “similar” to WWJava.  RATMAN (Rapidly Adaptive Terrain Models Available on the Net) is a real-time terrain rendering framework able to asynchronously access terrain information from remote servers that is written in C++ and Qt4 and is currently Linux only.

Ratman code is used in two Italian applications; Sardegna 3D and Italia3D.  Both applications have their websites in Italian, so I can’t really tell more about them.  The code base is fairly stable and has been out for about two years.

Well, ok.  Not exactly for WorldWind, but that is the latest update in imagery for Virtual Earth.  The largest updated section is in the Obliques (Bird’s Eye) imagery.  Check out the Virtual Earth Evangelist’s Blog for a complete list of what is in the latest update.

Still waiting for them to cover my area of Pennsylvania.. they have some back country areas in Bird’s Eye, but not populated areas.

Ok, since I found out yesterday about a new Virtual Globe on the loose, one build on Java no less.  I thought I would take a look at it and have some laughs while reading their related web sites (more on that later).  The new globe in question is pTolemy3D (where did they think up that name from?) and like WWJava, it is built with Java/JOGL code.  They claim to be more open source than WWJava is as well (yawn, we have heard this argument back and forth for 4 years now and I can still count the people that complain on one hand).  pTolemy3D is sponsored/supported/developed by Spatialcloud as a viewer for their services.

Looking at their example… well, their embed example does not work for me in FireFox 3.0.6 but I can get it to load in IE7.

I found the control of the web applet to be quite basic.. I could rotate and zoom in and that was all I was able to do.  also when zooming in and out there is a lot of flickering.. too much flickering actually.  I am not sure how they were able to get some of their screen shots.. and I was not able to do anything similar in their example.

patmurris, one of the WWJava devs, did take a quick browse through their source code and here is his comment on the code:

I had a quick look at the source code… and they still have a lot of ground to cover IMO. They may also run into the same pitfalls we encountered like camera ‘jitter’ due to floating point precisions with large numbers, or depth buffer issues when overlaying several terrain mesh on top of each others… but i just had a quick look and i may be wrong – and i’m biased of course .

Now, about some of their claims.. and a comment on slashgeo’s post.  I am not sure how slashgeo came to the idea that their is no real support for it.  What is it anyway?  WWJava, or embeding it into a webpage?  There is support for all of that and a ton of examples on how to do it.. so that is kind of a baseless claim.

Spatialcloud must have the same tunnel vision as Google..  they think that if they have done it, no one else has before them

pTolemy3D is also groundbreaking in being a fully browser-based 3D globe application. While other solutions in the market require installations of executables or special plug-ins, the Viewer will run in any web browser with common Java support.

Well, considering they are the fourth 3D globe in a web page, they are still only the second where no extral plug-in code is needed in the web browser.  So, not really “groundbreaking” to anyone.  I also could not get it to work in FF, so some minor issues still need to be worked out there.

Now back to pTolemy3D’s FAQ..

Why would I use pTolemy3D for my mapping applications instead of NASA’s Worldwind Java or other “open” 3D clients?

NASA’s Worldwind Java is a popular and well constructed 3D globe which has backing in the open-source community. Unfortunately, it is not a truly open-source project; at least not in the way in which open-source Ptolemy3D is instituted. pTolemy3D is committed to keeping the project as a totally open-source project under the guidelines of GPLv3. The government backed Worldwind Java is open but not as open, due to the fact is dictated by the Nasa Open Source license v1.3. Many developers have come to understand this difference, including some of those now working on pTolemy3D. Therefore, if you want full control over your source code, pTolemy3D is the solution you will want to use.

Did all this FUD get shot down back in 2006?  oh well.  There are quite a few users that are developing with WWJava and they do not seem to have any problems with the NOSA license.  Which is still a fair license.  You can develop on the code, you can release your own application using the code.. you can sell a commercial version of your application.

patmurris also comments on this as well:

Although i am not well versed in interpreting the various open source license, i’m wondering why they would go to the trouble of building from scratch another Java globe instead of extending or reworking the already quite mature World Wind Java SDK for the benefits of all. It seems they do resent the NOSA as too constraining…

The FAQ is actually very sparse on actuall information, they are more keen on saying they are better without giving reasons why it would be better.

While it looks like it could be a nice Java based globe, it has a lot of code maturing to do still.