World Wind - Definition and Overview

Related Words: America, Antipodes, Asia, Australasia, Earth, East, Eurasia, Europe, Everyman, Gaea, Ge, Levant, Occident, Oceania, Orient

Screenshot of World Wind showing USGS Urban Ortho-Imagery of Huntington Beach, Los Angeles

World Wind is a virtual globe developed by NASA for use on personal computers running Microsoft Windows. It overlays NASA and USGS imagery over 3D models of the Earth, and recently Mars.

The user can interact with the selected planet by rotating it and zooming in and out. An overlay of placenames and political boundaries is available. The software also contains a package to browse maps and other imagery on the internet using the OpenGIS Web Mapping Service.

World Wind (version 1.2e) now provides hyperlinks to Wikipedia.

Datasets available

Low resolution Blue marble datasets are included with the initial download; as a user zooms in to certain areas, additional high resolution data is downloaded from the NASA servers.

Image/terrain datasets:

Blue marble imagery
Landsat imagery
USGS imagery
SRTM terrain data

Animated data layers:

Animated Earth
MODIS
GLOBE

Additional data that can be projected onto the globe includes country borders, place names, and lines of latitude and longitude.

External links

NASA World Wind homepage (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov)
World Wind Central (http://www.worldwindcentral.com)
World Wind Wiki (http://wiki.worldwindcentral.com)

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the this Wikipedia article.