Topic: I can see my house from here! (Read 1680 times)

Iceman · « **on:** June 11, 2005, 12:11:30 am »

Nasa World Wind. Check it out, real time satellite imaging using NASA satellites. A buddy of mine showed it to me, and I'm DL'ing it now to try it out.

Figured you'd all enjoy it.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

Capt. Mike · « **Reply #1 on:** June 11, 2005, 07:52:47 am »

Downloaded it, now I'll see what it will do.

Thanks,

Mike

Jack Morris · « **Reply #2 on:** June 11, 2005, 12:09:38 pm »

At first I thought you were talking about the new Estes rockets that have a camera attached and you can take pics while it is about 500 ft in the air!

Just plain old Punisher · « **Reply #3 on:** June 11, 2005, 09:14:31 pm »

Keeping in mind the imagry isn't realtime. Depending on the location, the satelite photos can be several years old.

Iceman · « **Reply #4 on:** June 11, 2005, 09:40:05 pm »

as realtime as it gets, however, a good point.

toasty0 · « **Reply #5 on:** June 12, 2005, 10:34:31 am »

Nice find! +1

Villa64 · « **Reply #6 on:** June 12, 2005, 12:57:46 pm »

quote from the FAQ
----------------------------------------

Can I see the world in real-time?

This just isn't practical and won't be possible anytime soon. To do this requires a network of satellites dedicated to covering the earth. Just to provide as much detail as the base layers WorldWind loads first, the camera resolution on each one has to total about 100 megapixels. Perhaps the military has such a network, but it is certainly off-limits to anyone else. The images have to be received on the ground and processed. Then they all have to be combined where they overlap and corrected for the distortion caused by the earth's curvature. Finally after compressing the imagery from gigabytes down to several hundred megabytes, a server has to send it out to everyone. This requires an enormous amount of bandwidth for the server. Even if that weren't a problem, the internet connection for the majority of high-speed users is still too slow for more than about one update every hour.

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Jack Morris · « **Reply #7 on:** June 12, 2005, 02:04:17 pm »

I can see it happening soon, as Yahoo already has a feature on their local maps, real time traffic and accident reports! It even flashes where the accident is.

So with Onstar, yahoo, and other people doing nifty things with maps, why not with sat imagery?

Iceman · « **Reply #8 on:** June 12, 2005, 08:51:11 pm »

Someone needs to overlay this sucker with the ability to do driving directions.

toasty0 · « **Reply #9 on:** June 13, 2005, 10:44:55 am »

I just futzed around with Whirl Wind and unless I'm missing some feature of this product it is never gonna be competitive with Google's Keyhole.

Jerry

Iceman · « **Reply #10 on:** June 13, 2005, 01:48:25 pm »

I didn't know about keyhole, I'm checking it out right now.

Just plain old Punisher · « **Reply #11 on:** June 13, 2005, 11:34:19 pm »

Ummm cute. Naming it after the US photo recon satelite series

toasty0 · « **Reply #12 on:** June 14, 2005, 09:54:29 am »

Quote from: Punisher on June 13, 2005, 11:34:19 pm

Ummm cute. Naming it after the US photo recon satelite series

I believe that was the name of the comapny that Google bought it from.

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