I just returned from a cook's tour of the CalIT2 Visualization Lab at
UCSD. They do geo visualization heavily there, among other things.. (I
need to print up a t-shirt that says "I got dizzy at the Star Cave" :-)
They use two engines that I havent seen mentioned at all.. One is OSSIM
Planet, a C++ open source spinny globe. OSSIM has a surprisingly heavy
engine inside.. but, the user experience is nothing, nada.. Reason? Its
made to be driven by code, and it doesnt have the data sources baked in
to the GUI. Bring Your Own Lunch. I can tell you that swarms of PhDs
and engineers are using OSSIM, but its like you will never see the
results.. They generally dont publish widely.. Since its portable code,
OSSIM is regularly ported to drive exotic display devices.. for
example, here is a picture from the latest.. "the worlds largest
collection of pixels in a single display wall", with Norman Vine, a
tech lead on the OSSIM project.. sitting at the CalIT2 Viz Lab HQ at
Jacobs Hall UCSD.
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=20171
Another engine is GeoFusion.. written at the same time or before
KeyHole, GeoFusion has what is arguably the highest performance in the
industry, mainly due to the fact that the primary author was also on
the consortium that became OpenGL, while he was at SGI. GeoFusion has a
fantastic, and little known, toolkit they sell to specialized players..
WorldWind is separately, funded, or separately not funded, as the case
may be, at NASA. There is some serious concern over a Java engine,
some well founded, other perhaps not. But the truth is, either you are
in Java or you aren't. WW is in Java. Its good there are choices..
btw- I maintain a wiki of all things digital earh, with a list of
GeoBrowsers, at http://isde5.pbwiki.com/Earth-Browsers
additions welcome
I have my dorky user survey at the front page.. you can figure out ways
to avoid it, or fill it out and get the magic code, either way
I might get around to changing the survey in the near future
best regards
-Brian
==
Brian Hamlin
ISDE5 Steering Committee
Planetwork.net
OSGeo California Chapter
(415) 717-4462 (cell)
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