Geospatial Maps, Terrain, & 3D Environments
Why Google Earth ?
First of all: It's free.
Secondly: It is a 3D engine for the Internet.
Much like the 'Shockwave' engine that I am using for VRML, Google Earth provides a 3D mechanism to explore virtual worlds.
To download Google Earth: http://earth.google.com/
Google Earth is really easy to use. You just type in addresses or places and away you go to that location. Really cool customized locations have 3D structures built on them and can have additional information such as photographs and all kinds of data. These locations are saved as .KML and .KMZ (compressed) files. Just double clicking on one of these files takes you there...
Worlds for sharing :
| Experiment.kmz | It is in! This is the first pass of The Experiment Headquarters (my house :-0 geeky laugh)) modeled in Maya and translated into Google Earth via Collada. The ground terrain was over-laid with a quick hand painted texture. All of the texture maps used were created low resolution to optimize performance but were tiled when possible to display the best pixel quality possible.. |
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Space Shuttle.kmz
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Not all models exported into Google Earth have to be building structures or land maps. Here is one of the Space Shuttle flying low over Aberdeen. |
The Experiment: Create accurate, highly detailed, 3D worlds that can be visited and shared. The Geospatial tools that will be used are Global Mapper and ESRI. There is an abundant supply of geospatial (geography based) data setting around on the Internet. Most of the data has been created by using satellite images. Generally there are orthographic images of the ground, height data of terrain elevations, and the data base files used to add information to the data for objects such as buildings, bridges, bodies of water, trees, etc. The goal here is to try to do something graphically cool with the information.