Welcome to Earth3D
Earth3D exists as a Java and a C++ application. Both can be used at least on Linux, Windows and MacOS X. The speed of both applications is similar, the Java version seems not to be slower. So both versions are quite similar.
There are users that just want to use the application to view the earth. I recommend using the Webstart version as it does not need any installation, but also it does not have all features yet. These users should certainly also check out Google Earth as it has better and more detailed maps than a free program like this one can have.
But there were also several request from people who would like to integrate a 3D earth into their own program. For these people, I created a new subproject called Earth3d Lib that provides a QT Widget that displays the earth and allows to easily include own content. See the documentation page for details.
For a quick start you can start the Java version here:
Introduction
Earth3D is a program that visualizes the earth in a realtime 3D view. It uses data fromNASA,USGS, the CIA and the city ofOsnabrück. I would like to thank these organisations to allow me to use their data! The program is available as binary for Linux, MacOS X and Windows under the GPL license. The program's features are
- viewing the earth as a whole
- zooming in until countries, cities and even single houses become visible (if I had such maps, so this is currently limited to the city of Osnabrück, Germany)
- embedding external data like current earthquake positions or cloud data
My name isDominique Andre Gunia.
This package is a result from my work and my diploma thesis in computer science at the Institute of ComputerGraphics atBraunschweig University of Technology.
The support of this work by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant FE 431/4-5 and by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (BMBF) under grant 01 IRA 02G is gratefully acknowledged.
The program is hostet atSourceforge. The main data server for the earth data is at theInstitute of ComputerGraphics.
Other donators I would like to thank can be found on theDonations page!
To give a review of the program I will provide some images and videos here:
Videos
These videos can give you a short overview about the features and functions of Earth3D. They are encoded using DivX. If you cannot view them, please download a player on www.divx.com.
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Click on the image to watch a short movie that shows the program in action. It is a flight around the earth, showing the basic features of earth3d. You can also download it as AVI (4,7 MB, DivX) to get a higher quality: Location 1 Location 2 |
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Click on this image to watch a movie that shows a zoom from a view of europe down to the city of Osnabrück. You can also download it as AVI (3.5 MB, DivX) to get a higher quality: Location 1 Location 2 |
