kurt

World Wind

Just can't get enough of maps? Me neither. If you haven't checked out Anita's map post, do it.

Then go look at NASA's World Wind projecct. There are plenty of 3D globe projects out there, Scott showed one with a physical globe interface way back in my first year but I've long forgotten the name of it. Although the site is currently slashdotted (and it only runs on Windows 2000 or XP), by downloading their presentation kit, I think one can get a reasonable idea of what it's like. World Wind shows an Earth that seems incredibly alien to me, some of the pictures make it easy to forget that I live here. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm so attracted to maps, not only do they offer a perspective that I can rarely see (only when flying... which deserves its own comments), but they transform me into an astronaut. Orbitting my own world, I'm a visitor, an observer, a bit distant and perhaps maybe more objective.