An open source virtual globe for android
Paulo Dias Almeida · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2013
Virtual globes have a number of key bene ts as a platform for communicating and visualizing geospatial data over traditional technologies. Virtual globes have increased in popularity and several implementations are available that cater to di erent audiences from education to industry. Despite these advantages, an open source virtual globe solution is still not available for mobile environments. Our goal is the development on an open source globe for Android, able to receive 3D scenes from a W3DS server. We present the architecture and the implementation decisions. We choose to develop the virtual globe on top of osgEarth which takes advantage of the OpenSceneGraph toolkit. Based on this decision, we explain how osgEarth was extended to consume new 3D data sources and how it was ported to the Android platform. Porting to Android requires major changes in the OpenGL API usage. Embedded devices only support a subset of the OpenGL API. We provide a virtual globe application that runs natively on the Android operating system. It is implemented on top of the osgEarth framework. osgEarth was ported to Android and expanded to support additional features. Pointers to the source code repositories are provided. With the work developed in this project, mobile virtual globe solutions can be customized and deployed, providing powerful visualizations and more intuitive interactions.