Virtual Globes

History and Popularization

The creation of virtual globes is the result of 3D software, virtual reality and hypermedia, and remote-sensing technology developments that have been ongoing since the 1970s. It was Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel, Snow Crash, that popularized the concept of a computerized globe showing dynamic imagery and inspired the initial real-life development of such programs. In Snow Crash, the primary protagonist accesses a software program called “Earth” that was created by the Central Intelligence Corporation as a user interface to their geospatial information, including weather data and real-time satellite surveillance. This “live” virtual globe presents greater capabilities than current real-world programs; however, virtual-globe technologies are developing increasing abilities to display dynamic data.

Inspired by Snow Crash, Mark Pesce, a cocreator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), developed WebEarth, an open-source VRML application that builds a model of the Earth from composite satellite images. The first commercially available virtual globe to display dynamically updated earth data (clouds) was EarthBrowser. It was originally released in 1998 as a Macintosh shareware product called Planet Earth and continues to be developed by its creator, Matt Giger, for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

An explosion of virtual-globe technologies occurred in 2001 with the development of Keyhole's Earth Viewer (acquired by Google in 2004 and released in 2005 as Google Earth), SkylineGlobe, SINTEF (Norwegian: Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning [The Foundation for [Page 3024]Scientific and Industrial Research]) (Norkart since 2006) virtual globe, and Geofusion's GeoPlayer. However, it was the release of the open-source project NASA World Wind (2004), followed by Google Earth (2005), that brought virtual globes to the attention of a wider audience. In 2005, the use of these tools to aid rescue and relief efforts related to Hurricane Katrina received media coverage demonstrating the abilities offered by virtual globes, and their day-to-day use entered the public consciousness. By June 2008, downloads of Google Earth, the most widely used virtual globe, had topped 400 million.

Both NASA World Wind and Google Earth were developed as stand-alone applications. In contrast, Microsoft leveraged existing server and mapping technologies to create its Virtual Earth platform. It powers Live Search Maps inside an Internet browser. Released in 2005 as a 2D mapping product, it evolved into a globe application when 3D viewing capability was added in 2006. Unique to Virtual Earth is the inclusion of high-resolution aerial photography captured from a bird's-eye perspective view.

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