Web World Wind is a open-source 3D virtual globe for web applications. It is written in HTML5 and JavaScript and provides a JavaScript API for controlling all aspects of virtual globe interaction and display.
Web World Wind source code : GitHub
World wind Vs Google Earth
License
Google Earth provides the proprietary license. Whereas as the NASA world wind offers Open-source license.
Price
Google Earth offers the free version which contains small ads in it. There is another version of Google Earth (Google Earth Pro) available with some additional features. This version costs $400 per year.
Thus, the NASA World Wind is available for free of cost.
Imagery
Google Earth provides only one single layer with hi-resolution patches.
NASA World Wind Provides multiple layers for Earth such as blue marble, Atmosphere, Bing Aerial with labels, USGS Imagery Topo Basemap, Bing Roads and few layers for other planets.
Data Formats
Google Earth Supports only few data formats like KML\KMZ, WMS, Images, GPX, COLLADA.
NASA World Wind Supports all most all the GDAL ( Geospatial Data Abstraction Library ). Some of the common formats supports by NWW are World Wind XML, KML/KMZ, SHP, WMS, WFS, Images and some Collada.
GPS Devices
Google Earth don’t have any official support for GPS devices.
NASA World Wind has some additional plug-ins for GPS devices Such as GPS2WorldWind, GPS Tracker.
My Project on NASA World Wind
Secure Public Portal
The City of Springfield, Oregon and the KGiSL Institute of Technology (Coimbatore, India) have teamed up to provide a secure public information portal based on NASA WorldWind technology.
Deploying a full open source stack, a rigorous hardening process and secure set of spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) connectors, the goal is open data through secure services. Solution supports community planning, design, construction and environmental protection. Future plans extend affordable public safety and medical services to underprivileged sectors of the community. The aim is an affordable open blueprint to develop and sustain basic public information services in an increasingly hostile cyber environment.
This Project has owns first prize in Helsinki NASA Europa Challenge 2017 under professional category.
What we did?
At the initial stages of the projects we mostly worked on the UI changes like adding Icons, Modifying menus.
In later updation we are provided with Cities various data of Facilities, Base, Environment, Land Base layers in form of Web Map Services(WMS) from Springfield, Oregon Government. We have included all this layers into the application.
Then, We have moved from Mapserver to Geoserver for converting the Web Map Services (WMS) to Web Feature Services (WFS) for implementing Metadata feature and GetFeatureInfo
Link preview : Springfield Data Viewer
This project helped me to learn lot of things about geospatial, NASA World Wind, JavaScript. It is wonderful experiences to work with my colleagues. Special thanks to Mr. Anjesh R and Mr. Ashok R for mentorship and support at various stages.
