NASA WorldWind is worth a check.
“World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.”
WorldWind uses Managed DirectX (MDX) to acheive this. But what caught my attention was /cfWorldWind, when I was reading Mike Hall's weblog. Managed DirectX 3D Mobile (MD3DM) can do wonders and this is a proof of it.
One of the screen shots of /cfWorldWind:
Microsoft always has this tradition of code-naming their products in a unique way. “Hawaii“ is the code name of the Visual Studio IDE to be launched after Oracus. It definitely grabs the attention of developers. Sometimes it does scare developers when they begin to think - “Ok, so what about Whidbey? Is is already out-dated? Do I need to re-learn Hawaii“, “What about Oracus? Whats the difference in it?“. Hawaii is supposed to be a completely re-designed toolset.
So far I havent come across any resource on the Microsoft website which shows a complete product release and platform support diagram which talks about the upcoming releases. A consolidated view of the release strategy of Microsoft would be interesting to see.
[eWeek]
Update:
In continutation to the subject of our (Team: BlueCQ - Sabarish, Sharath and myself) team's participation in the Imagine Cup 2005, yesterday we had the South Zone finals in Chennai. We were geared up with our idea to dissolve boundaries using technology, calling it “BlueCQ” (as in ICQ). It is a bluetooth based people networking platform with lots of innovative; fun and business oriented features incorporated in it.
No twists, straight to the point...
Our team didnt make it to the next round (National Finals) because of the following reasons sighted by the judges and the concerned people.
- Bluetooth is going to die / Its already dead and 802.11b has already taken over
- Bluetooth is unreliable
- Bluetooth has a very short range (we had come up with an innovate solution for this but judges weren technically sound to understand and appreciate it... it was disgusting to note this)
When I first heard about Bluetooth I only knew 2 things about it - its a cool new wireless technology, its a substitute for Infra-red. The latter isnt obviously completely correct, which I realised after getting myself involved with Bluetooth programming for the Imagine Cup. Anil Dhawan's video on Channel9 is what motivated us to pick-up Bluetooth as the medium for communication. I started off by doing some initial research about what the technology is and how it works (the Bluetooth stack, the Bluetooth radio etc.). I didnt want to do a crappy job by starting off right away with some code.
According to the modules that we divided, I was the SDK for our platform which has been a very exciting experience for me. Wouldnt be explicit but, our project has a feature which the Bluetooth SIG (the body governing the Bluetooth standard) wants to incorporate into the Bluetooth stack after 2 years !!
We went ahead with this idea and landed up in Chennai on 13th May 2005 for the South Zone finals. We did have a few last moment preparations and sat coding in the hotel where we were staying. We were told that the judges would be from the “industry”. So, we were expecting a good technical interaction. However, expectations always do not turn in to reality. There was a tie with another team after the scoring and we didnt get through because we committed the crime of using Bluetooth (which according to them is dead).
Its really frustrating to note that people are not well informed of the technology and just speak what they “hear“ from others. Its the general notion that, when you ask someone about Bluetooth, his immediate reaction would be - “Naah, its dead.” (even without really knowing whats happening out there).
Even one of the Microsoft (India) folks said that Bluetooth has been replaced by 802.11b already !! Its unfortunate that probably the Microsoft guy hadnt seen this podcast from Microsoft MEDC 2005. To add to my arguments, Microsoft is also funding the Software GreenHouse initiative, which is currently working on a Bluetooth based social networking application which is hardly 50% of what our idea is. It called - “BlueJab”.
The war between different technologies will continue.
Hoping to see a better IC 2006.