Odysseus Unbound Update

An update on the Odysseus Unbound project -

Successful first year’s Fugro sponsorship of the “Odysseus Unbound” project
Successful first year’s deployment of Fugro-sponsored geoscientific techniques
Latest technology is used to investigate Europe’s earliest enigma
Land, sea and airborne methods accurately image sub-surface beneath key valley
Geological update to appear in September 2008 issue of Geoscientist
Public lecture to be held at the Geological Society, London on October 2 2008

Full pdf available here.

 

How is this legal?

According to Google their licenses with imagery suppliers is so prohibitive they have to aggressively pursue programs which use that imagery on anything other than a web page, so can someone explain how viewing the same data inside Second Life is legal?  Did Google renegotiate with their providers?  Is Second Life breaking the law?  Has Google been lying all along?

 

Bloody great

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NASA and Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG - News) today announced plans to develop a new high-technology campus at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

Under the terms of the 40-year agreement, Google will lease 42.2 acres of unimproved land in NASA Research Park at Ames to construct up to 1.2 million square feet of offices and research and development (R&D) facilities in a campus-style setting. An overview of the area is available in Google Maps™ and the Google Earth™ program at http://maps.google.com/googleameslease.

Another dumb NASA move.

 

Another Google idea ‘borrowed’ from World Wind

And here we go again, Google release a beta API that lets you display a virtual globe on your website and the world goes ooh wow! We have had a World Wind Java API for over a year and have many users already.

There is a big difference between our API and theirs though, with ours you can do anything you want and its truly free, check out the information and demos on WorldWind Central.

The above video is from the applet embedded in this webpage

Oh and don’t forget to read these two pages if you do want to use the non Open Source API,  Google Privacy Policy and the Google Maps API ToS, and don’t worry I’m sure your soul will be happy with the millions of others in the patented ‘Don’t be Evil ectoplasmic to server powering energy converter’.

 

Another World Wind video clip - Blue Mars

Well I was going to play oblivion last night and finish the Tears of the Fiend Mod, but my wireless keyboard decided to stop responding, so instead I finished off a clip of Mars I had started, and Blue Mars is the result.

There were no special plug-ins or tricks used, the only thing I created was the alpha channeled base image (Paint Shop Pro 7 is a real pain to make an alpha channel png with), the actual images and specular mask I used came from a Green and Blue Mars png I found from Celestia links.

Plug-ins used -

Shiny Marble
Lens Flare
Heavenly Bodies
Movie Recorder

Put together as always using VirtualDub, the music is performed by the U.S. Air Force Band, so the entire thing should be public domain, the high res Xvid version is downloadable below.

BlueMars.avi

 

World Wind server hackers caught

Well I don’t recall it being a big issue, and I can’t really remember what they did to the site, NASA network admins are quick to block anything suspicious (sometimes too quick), but apparently the group who hacked Jira have been caught by Spanish police, from CyberCrime & Doing Time -

Members of the group are said to have hit NASA back in March, but it is unclear whether “Spanish Hackers Team”’s March defacement of “climate.gsfc.nasa.gov” is the same reference. Certainly its the same server that the closely allied hacker “SSH-2″ hit as recently as April 25th, but we do have a positive reference of D.O.M member “an0de” hitting the NASA server “issues.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov” back in August 2007.

I wouldn’t worry about any private data being exposed, the issues server is for developers and community members to report bugs and is fully viewable by the public anyway, plus these hacking kiddies just deface sites which is pretty pointless in my opinion.

 

World Wind search is working again

Users of World Wind will probably have noticed placefinder has been broken for a while, I assumed it was due to API changes and some error on the WorldWind Central server, after getting an email from Randy Kim at NASA it turns out someone forgot to renew our .org domain, and of ourse that had to be the address World Wind uses. So FEF/Yahoo!/Google searches are all working again thanks to Dom at Vidahost.

 

Some links to higher resolution versions of my videos

As YouTube doesn’t support decent resolutions yet here are some links to higher resolution/better quality versions of some of my clips, be warned some are big others are huge, they are in either xvid , QT MP4(h.264) or wmv so you may need to install some codecs, enjoy.

WWJ Cascades

Earth Day

Google Ocean

Las Vegas (Virtual Earth)

SDSS

World Wind 1.4 promo

Io

Longer World Wind 1.4 promo

Las Vegas (World Wind)

Unhitched

Rain forest

Mars

Zoom to Austria

Even longer World Wind 1.4 promo (very high quality)

 

World Wind Java video 1

I think this is the first time I have made a World Wind Java video clip, but expect more as it is finally starting to impress me, the music in the clip is actually by World Wind Java developer Patrick Murris (a man of many skills).

The video was a direct capture from the applet running on the Cascade Volcanoes Tour Applet page, the page is fairly simple (screenshot below), but shows the power of the SDK.

The applet starts with a standard Earth Globe then zooms in to the Cascades region, clicking on each vol canoe’s name in the list smoothly moves the camera to its location, and of course you can freely drag the camera around, zoom and tilt like in any other virtual globe. In my opinion this would be a great addition to many wikipedia pages, and could be used on many educational websites to easily give them a ‘wow’ factor and grab the attention of today’s children.

 

NASA World Wind slides from Javaone

Patrick Murris has posted a ppt of the slides used at Javaone to the world Wind forums, check them out here.