Development status Active Type Virtual Globe Website www.openwebglobe.org | Operating system | |
Developer(s) FHNW - University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (German: Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz) | ||
OpenWebGlobe is a project and technology for processing and interactively visualizing vast volumes of geospatial data in a 3d virtual globe. The OpenWebGlobe virtual globe can have several data categories like image data, elevation data, points of interest, vector data, and 3D objects. Before streaming such massive and complex data over the internet, this data must be pre-processed. Such pre-processing usually comprises a transformation from a local to a global reference system, creation of pyramid layers or levels of detail (LOD), tiling of the data, and optionally compression and encryption. Recently, these algorithms were ported to high performance compute cluster using OpenMP and MPI and are also released as open-source. Because data sets are usually large, containing several terabytes, advanced out-of-core rendering mechanisms with a level of detail approach are used for visualization.
Contents
OpenWebGlobe is an open-source project. It is written in WebGL. The lead developer is the Institute of Geomatics Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (German: Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz).
Developing Globe Applications
The OpenWebGlobe SDK is also a 3D engine on top of WebGL. With the OpenWebGlobe SDK it is possible to create custom virtual globe applications. This JavaScript "Hello World" example creates a virtual globe and adds an image and elevation layer:
Switzerland 3D
The demo version of a potential 3D Viewer for geo.admin.ch - the geo-portal of the Swiss Confederation - is online at swiss3d.openwebglobe.org until July 31, 2012.The scene covers entire Switzerland and is based on high resolution data from swisstopo: SWISSIMAGE, Dvided in this demo is of good quality and high resolution, which can be seen in the screenshot of the Piz Palü mountain: