[Freegis-list] New Free Software project - 3map

[Viveka]

Good hello,

Chris Thorne, myself and a few others have begun a small project that 
may be of interest to the FreeGIS community. It's partly funded by 
our local telco, Telstra. We are building a Free Software platform 
for representing the Earth in 3D online. Anyone will be able to build 
applications, add content as well as enhance the platform in the open 
source spirit. Just a tiny project really but we still encourage 
interested contributors - I am sure there is something in this for 
everyone :)

Some points of note:

1. we're Free Software/Open Source (GPL)
2. we'll be building on open standards like GeoVRML and X3D
3. we're aiming for a broad user base, and will be expending 
considerable effort on usability
4. we're building an immersive realtime 3D client
5. we'll provide a way for end-users to publish directly to the 
geospatial database from within the VR environment
6. everything will be tagged with structured metadata
7. end-users will be able to dynamically filter their worldview using 
dynamic queries.

The foundation stone is Chris Thorne's Rez project, for 
multiresolution terrain handling. Source and executables for Rez are 
available, and other project materials will be published as we go as 
well.  We're actively looking for collaborators, and there's plenty 
of room for both applications of and extensions to 3map, so let us 
know if you're interested.

more at: http://www.ping.com.au/3map

Regards,

V.
-- 
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
{ http://www.karmanaut.com | http://www.planet-earth.org
    http://www.MacWeb3D.org | http://sydney.siggraph.org.au }
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.