NASA World Wind

This is one of the coolest programs I’ved used in a while, and I can’t believe it’s not more widely known. World Wide Wind is a 3D Atlas, made up of satellite photos, you can zoom right out to see the whole globe, spin it around with the mouse and zoom right in on any city, and when I say right in I mean right in. In cities in the USA you can zoom in so that 1 pixle represents one metre, you can literally see people and cars. Other cities across the world you can get to 25 metres per pixel. This is a 180meg download and would probably only be decent on a broadband connection because it downloads the satellite images on the fly (although they aren’t current, the world trade centres are still in New York).

Here’s a couple of screenshots I took

Geelong, My Home Town
The Red Circle is about where my house is.

Navy Pier, Chicago
Here’s how close it can get in major US cities, those dots are people.