Saturday, June 15, 2013

Jaanga oSome Globe ~ R4 ~ Improved Resolution and Better Material Handling


This update to oSome Globe adds much improved resolution for zoom levels 1 and 2. Work on better resolution for zoom level 3 will start soon.

Also the commands to update the meshes after editing the vertices were added with the effect that rendering quality is much improved.


Link
http://jaanga.github.io/cookbook/osome-globe/r4/index.html

Friday, June 14, 2013

Jaanga oSome Globe ~ R3 ~ Poof of Concept



Yes, I know the idiom is "proof of concept" and thus the title looks like a fail, but in this case the "poof" is intentional.

The above demo is a work in progress, a sketch. You will note that elevations are set so they are grossly exaggerated. In real life the globe is as smooth a billiard ball. So the 'poof' is just just a means of saying that the globe has been slightly exploded.

Note also the light frustum and cubes bobbing out of the globe and other artifacts and curiosities.

BTW, the purply translucent sphere indicates the sea level. What appears inside is the sea bottom - again with a gross exaggeration of depth.

For the moment the 3D topology only goes down to zoom level 3, but I hope in a few days to have 3D all the way down to zoom level 10 or more with elevations at approximately 1,000 meter intervals.

The level of detail after that would be to get down to elevations at about 30 meter intervals. More about that possibility at some future date.

The main thing is that what you see here are the rudiments of an animated 3D globe embedded in a Blogger post with all the code hosted on a GitHub server and the data sourced from the FOSS OpenStreetMap servers.

Keep in mind, as always: "The aim of the project is to create a lightweight 3D library with a very low level of complexity — in other words, for dummies."

So watch out: we dummies are going global!

Link:
http://jaanga.github.io/cookbook/osome-globe/r3/index.html

BTW, the the globe up above should work - it's a simplified version of what's available via the link.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Jaanga oSome Globe ~ Full 3D + 18 zoom levels ~ Cookbook Demo Code

For a lot of the time since the Urdacha debacle in April, I have been working with 3D globe models of the earth for the FGx project. These have for the most part been based on the Three.js globe in Chrome Experiments.

This globe has a kind of usefulness in terms of simple DataViz. I think it can be thought of as the 3D equivalent of the pie chart. Great for beginners.

But for almost any other use, the globe code is quite limited.

So I began to think of the globe I would like to have.

The features should include:

  • Ability to access all sorts of open source and publicly available data from, say, Open Street Map, MapQuest and Google Maps
  • All runs in your browser in a just a few hundred lines of code
  • Fully 3D with easy to add and remove 3D assets at runtime
  • Eighteen levels of zoom like OSM and Google Maps
  • Basic 3D topology for the entire globe
  • Full 3D camera controls
  • User interface overlay built with a standard library such as jQuery

I'm sure there's more, but in a nutshell I want a simplified Google Map and a Google Earth that I can create and edit using tools made for dummies.

So far I think it's all doable. The link below will take you to Jaanga oSome Globe r2 on GitHub which supports 18 levels of zoom. I am working on r3 and the work on 3D topology is underway.

Link
http://jaanga.github.io/cookbook/osome-globe/r2