What is WorldWind?
WorldWind is a planetary globe 3D engine. WorldWind allows application developers to quickly and easily create interactive visualizations of geographical information in a 3D planetary context. Organizations around the world use WorldWind to monitor weather patterns, visualize cities and terrain, track vehicle movements, analyze geospatial data and educate humanity about the Earth.
Features and Benefits
It's open source
Because WorldWind is completely open source, extending the API is simple and easy to do. This creates a powerful platform for giving any application the means to express, manipulate and analyze spatial data. WorldWind technology can be incorporated into a wide range of applications, including Windows, Mac, Linux, web, and mobile devices.
Build what you want
WorldWind is different from a 3D globe like Google Earth because it is not an application. Instead, it is an SDK (software development kit) that software engineers can use to build their own applications. WorldWind provides a geographic rendering engine for powering a wide range of projects, from satellite tracking systems to flight simulators.
NASA does the heavy lifting
With WorldWind handling the hard work of visualizing geographic data (generating terrain from elevation models, selecting and displaying images from imagery servers, etc), software engineers are free to focus on solving the problems specific to their own domains and more easily building whatever geospatial applications they choose.
Get Started
Web WorldWind
Create a web app or simply embed a globe in your page. For more information see the project's home page. To get right into the code, check out the Web WorldWind GitHub repository.
WorldWind Android
Develop a world-class WorldWind application for your Android phone or tablet. Instructions, tutorials, and examples are available on the project's home page. The WorldWind Android GitHub repository contains the library and code.
WorldWind Java
Build a cross-platform geospatial desktop application in Java. For lots of examples and documentation go to the project's home page. Or clone the WorldWind Java GitHub repository and start coding.
WorldWind's source code, issue tracking and releases are available on GitHub and managed by the NASA WorldWind development team.
github.com/NASAWorldWind