Talk of Linux and Mac OS X ports began appearing on the World Wind forums as early as September 2004, but by June 2005 Russian programmer Vitaliy Pronkin had had enough of waiting and took matters into his own hands. World Wind Central lists dozens of add-ons, scripts, and plugins, from map packs to information overlays to new functionality - all of which still run only on Windows. Likewise, neither Google Earth nor vanilla World Wind interface with GPS devices, but third-party developers have written a World Wind GPS Tracker plugin. It is no surprise, then, that one of the first add-ons developed by third-party programmers was OneEarth - a plugin to allow clients to request data from any map server speaking the WMS (Web Map Service) standard. The World Wind code is straightforward enough - request tile coordinates from the server, then composite the results together on the client side, rendering each layer in the specified order and opacity (unlike Keyhole and Google Earth, which combine map data on the server side). But open source developers are still interested. Net, which should run on Mono, the DirectX requirement is an obstacle to porting the application to non-Windows platforms. Though the current release (1.3.2) is built on. The first widespread public release was in early August 2004, under the NASA Open Source Agreement. Trouble arose when implementing the visualization, however, so a proof-of-concept was drawn up in C# and DirectX and released as World Wind 1.0. According to project spokesman Randy Kim, the original core was intended to run on Linux and Windows using OpenGL. The World Wind project began in 2002 at NASA Learning Technologies, a lab whose purpose is to develop educational software for delivering NASA data. GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) aggregate data measured educational collaborators.USGS (United States Geographical Survey) high-resolution imagery of the U.S.MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) feeds of time-relevant events like wildfires, storms, and volcanos.NASA SVS (Scientific Visualization Studio) animations of earth science phenomena.STRM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) topological maps showing elevation data.Landsat 7, the primary satellite image mosaic, including data outside the visible light spectrum.Blue Marble, the high-resolution composite photograph of the entire globe.On the other hand, the project’s background in scientific visualization means it can handle more complicated tasks, and there are far more data sources built in. By some accounts it is less polished than Google Earth - the primary image data comes from Landsat 7, which has less resolution than the Keyhole commercial imagery. World Wind, by contrast, is open source and available now. Similarly, even though Google has published the specification for KML (Keyhole Markup Language), programmers have no access to the client or server source code to add additional functionality. A Linux/NetBSD/Plan9 port might be technically possible, but nothing can be done about it. The combination of these facts lead some to speculate that a Linux port is not only technically viable but perhaps underway in some secret back room at the Googleplex. Furthermore, the Google Earth Fusion component of the enterprise corporate package already runs on Linux. Google Earth can use either OpenGL or DirectX as its 3D toolkit, and the System Requirements page has long touted the claim that a Mac OS X-native version of the application is being worked on. The Earthviewer 3D was redubbed Google Earth in May and released at three price points: free (basic), $20 per year (“Plus”) and $400 per year (“Pro”). Keyhole was founded in 2001, released its first product in 2003, and was purchased by Google in October 2004. It relies primarily on commercial satellite images from one to two years ago. Google Earth, you may recall, is a re-branding of Keyhole, Inc.’s Earthviewer product. The only difference is that World Wind is open source. Zoom in and look for your childhood home, fly past your favorite landmarks, study the coastlines for continental drift - you have all of the same options. NASA’s World Wind project - like Google Earth - is a 3D planetary visualization system that overlays satellite imagery, weather, political, and topological map data. In some respects the search engine behemoth is quite OS-agnostic, but the 3D virtual globe remains limited to Windows desktops only. Few of Google’s projects, rumors of projects, and acquisitions have generated as much envy among Linux users as Google Earth.
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