EarthSwarms - Swarms of People Learning about the Earth

This is the page for my Earth Swarms work.

International Digital Earth 3-D Visualization Challenge Entry

Or, earthSwarms 1.0

First the packages:

MacOS/X 10.3/10.4 PPC and Intel in the form of a disk image.
At the last minute I was able to get access to an Intel Mac to test, and, the colors are slightly wrong. It seems that yellow isn't available in the 3D images. Therefore the cloud fraction display is extremely ugly.

Thanks to John M McIntosh's quick work though we have a fixed VM for the mac which gets the correct colors on Intel systems. If you have an Intel mac please use Squeak 3.8.16beta5U.app.zip in place of Squeak 3.8.15beta1U in the disk image.
Windows (XP is tested, but, should work fine on 98/2000 and Vista as well) in the form of a ZIP file
Linux/BSD/et al in the form of a tar.gz file

System Requirements

Basically anything with about 50meg free of memory built since 2000 or so should work fine. The faster the more interactive, and, therefore the slower the more patient you have to be.
24 bit color is prettier, but, 8 bit colors work as well.
There are not any special graphics card requirements.

Now the acknowledgements

This is written in Squeak an Open-Sourced Smalltalk. Please read Squeak's License.
We use the public domain topography from the SRTM Plus project.
The science overlay data comes from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder AIRS instrument on board NASA's Aqua spacecraft.

Motivation

This work was inspired by the International Digital Earth 3-D Visualization Challenge. Why? I've always been interested in Earth data and I'm becoming increasing concerned about global climate change.

In general it seems that folks are starting to accept the idea of global climate change. This is a big enough problem that the only way to move forward is to convince large groups of people that it is important and that we need to change our habits. One way to do this is to actually show them the data and let them see for themselves and learn. Most people are not idiots. Let's make this interesting and entertaining enough that folks want to spend time on this, and then, what do you know, they will.

Google Earth and NASA's World Wind are both quite cool, but, they don't run on my systems. I'd like something to work on as many systems as possible.

The overall requirements are therefore:

Runs everywhere. No fiddly software installs and no graphics card requirements. NO GPU. No Windows ONLY. Download, unzip/untar, run.
No additional software. If you have DirectX or OpenGL, great. Otherwise maybe it's just a bit slower
Freely available software
Freely available data

The basic decisions and goals are constrained by the 5 weeks we had before the deadline:

Developed in Squeak 3.6

Cross platform. Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista, MacOS/X, Linux/BSD/etc.
Balloon 3D, the Squeak 3D engine, is mature in 3.6 with a nice tutorial.
3.6 is fast enough on my older systems, and therefore fast enough on other's systems. 3.9, the current version, is too fancy and runs a bit too slow.
Newer Squeak VMs run 3.6 just fine
I pretty much know squeak.

We had 5 weeks or so. We therefore can display terrain for a few selected areas of the world, undersea terrain if they are coastal. We can't do the world, though, it would be easy to load new datasets.

San Francisco Bay area
Mediterranean Sea area around Genoa Italy.
Geneva Switzerland

We can display a small set of science data from AIRS on top of the terrain.

26 Mar 2007

Stick a fork in it, because it's done. The change set lives here and the packages are listed above.

04 Mar 2007

Got a first release up and running. It can display three areas of the world: Geneva, Genoa, and San Francisco. Not perfect, but a nice first cut. It uses the srtm30_plus data.

27 Feb 2007

Squeak/EarthSwarms

Ah, it seems that the Topex/UCSD people at Scripps have slightly more useful data called srtm30_plus. We'll use that. They have added Bathymetry as well.

We can now display an array using Balloon3D in Squeak. Next up, read the srtm30 data and display that.