Mapping Hacks

Explore a 3-D Model of the Entire World #24

Chapter 3, Mapping Your World

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HACK

All these specialty sets can be explored under the Tools menu.

World Wind also features over four million place names and boundary lines

for countries and states, which you can view by selecting the “Borders and

Places” icon on the toolbar. If you click on the big magnifying glass icon or

go to Tools

➝ Place Finder, you will get a dialog box where you can type in a

name to be taken directly to that location, as shown in Figure 3-13.

A Sneak Peek into the Past

Since World Wind is part of a NASA initiative to help educators, they are

providing a peek at some future features of the program. If you click on the

“Lewis and Clark” icon in the toolbar, World Wind will overlay the route

Lewis and Clark took on their journeys, as shown in Figure 3-14. The num-

bered icons are interactive, and clicking on them will open a journal entry

on the Lewis and Clark web site (http://www.lewis-clark.org/).

Currently, there are no end-user tools to build the overlay files, but since

this is an open source project, hopefully the tools will be forthcoming.

Final Thoughts

Until now, a desktop-mapping application of this magnitude would have

been a pretty ambitious project, but it seems like NASA has pulled it off

Figure 3-13. World Wind’s Place Finder dialog