See World(s) Online

NASALogoOne of the longest tenure items on my “To-Do” exploration is to get the hang of the Google Earth API and learn how to create a web app around it. This was very exciting web technology when Google seemed to be moving Google Earth from a standalone application to a web-based solution. Unfortunately its web architecture was based around browser plug-ins which eventually lead to its death.

It made sense for Google Earth functionality to be folded into Google Maps, but that seemed to be a slow process of assimilation. It never occurred to me that there are other alternatives out there until I stumbled across a talk about NASA’s World Wind project. (A hands-on activity, too, with a sample project to play with.) The “Web World Wind” component of the project is a WebGL library for geo-spatial applications, which makes me excited about its potential for fun projects.

The Java edition of World Wind has (or at least used to) have functionality beyond our planet Earth. There were ways to have it display data sets from our moon or from Mars. Sadly the web edition has yet to pick up that functionality.

JPL does currently expose a lot of Mars information in a web-browser accessible form on the Mars Trek site. According to the speaker of my talk, it was not built on World Wind. He believes it was built on Cesium, another WebGL library for global data visualization.

I thought there was only Google Earth, and now I know there are at least two other alternatives. Happiness.

The speaker of the talk is currently working in the JPL Ops Lab on the OnSight project, helping planetary scientists collaborate on Mars research using Microsoft’s Hololens for virtual presence on Mars. That sounds like an awesome job.

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