Rocket scientists strike back!

Just after I posted about Google unleashing Google Earth I heard about the equivalent mapping wonder World Wind from those rocket scientists at NASA.

Having played around with both a bit I can report that on my humble laptop Google's rendering engine is less quirky than NASA's but when it comes down to the resulting image NASA often has much better data. By being able to manually select different data sources NASA lets you go from super high res urban photos all the way to non-photographic topographic maps.

By and large NASA has much better (higher resolution) topographic info so when you tilt the view the images sometimes end up looking amazing. Along the cliffs where I fly my paraglider the view is stunning only marred by the fact the photos appear to have been taken quite a while ago. On the roof of my building I can see the stanchions of our fence around the rooftop garden, they are less than 1 foot - much higher resolution than Google. And out in the wilds where Google often has very low res NASA's World Wind still offers 1m resolution which is still very good.

About the only thing Google really beats NASA on is the user interface and the ability to do stuff like show roads and import GPS waypoint data. However there appear to many add-on features for the NASA program which I have not fully explored. I think this may allow multiple layers to be combined and there is quite likely a way to get regular maps merged into the view.

I look forward to playing with World Wind on my PC that has a decent 3D graphics card, it should be fun!