Somewhere last week, I found a link to a cool NASA software project—World Wind—which appears to be a revival of the Blue Marble Viewer (for the Blue Marble project) with a different code base.

The ability to view and zoom in on a 3D globe of the Earth is wonderful, but the program only works on Windows, and since its code base is C# and DirectX, instead of C++ and OpenGL, it will be very difficult to port to other platforms. I applaud NASA for creating this, but since our tax dollars are being spent, they should be spent on tools that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, to ensure equal access.

And the UI is also as frustrating and confusing to use as The National Map. Even though the whole thing is rendered in 3D, there is, of course, no support for either 3D mice such as the SpaceBall or stereoscopic viewing.

I’ll be testing this tool this week, comparing it with the commercial competition—Keyhole, GlobeXplorer, and Earth Explorer. (I might also take a NOAA thingie for a spin.) In software like this, I would expect to be able to extract geo-referenced images easily, view the content in stereo, and use my SpaceBall to manipulate the view.

This might keep me busy long enough to get an answer from Autodesk and Bentley about including their mapping software in the Field Day mapping project/software review.

The SpaceBall 5000 USB that I received at AU impliments the USB HID (Human Interface Device) specification for a “multi-axis controller”, but because no software I have yet tried supports this cross-OS, cross-manufacturer standard for 3D input devices, I must install 3Dconnexion’s system driver and then a sub-driver for each program I’d like to use the controller with—AutoCAD, Photoshop, Office, and so-on.

Sometimes this is a good thing, because not all software vendors may not realize that their 2D application would benefit from a 3D mouse, but in most cases, it makes the configuration of the controller more difficult and less seamless than it would be if the app supported it natively. For any 3D design or viewing program—even the free ones—to not support this natively is as not supporting a 2D mouse natively.

When I first plugged the SpaceBall in, Windows XP informed me that it had found and installed a driver, and that my new hardware was now ready to be used. That should be all I needed to do, and the fact that it isn’t is the fault of CAD software vendors; not 3dconnexion.

With that preface out of the way, let me detail what I found installing the 3dconnexion driver. (Keep in mind that I’ll frequently disable it when testing software, to find out which applications support it natively.)

I was surprised when the installation program complained that Adobe Acrobat was running, and that I must stop it before continuing. At the time, I had no instances of Acrobat running, and the icon was not to be found in the system tray. So I was forced to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Task Manager, re-sort the list by application name, and end the Acrobat.exe process. Yuck.

After dealing with that, I chose the Custom install, and found that it had detected the following software installed and selected the appropriate SpaceBall plug-ins for them: Office, AutoCAD, Acrobat, and Photoshop. It then asked me if it should install and launch the system driver (3DxWare) on startup.

And then it proceeded to direct my browser to the 3Dconnexion Web site and a form asking me to register the product; magically selecting the applications it had found and installed plug-ins for. Unfortunately, it did so without launching a new browser window or tab, so it did so in my current window: this in-progress posting, just about wiping out all my input!

Note to the installation team: Opening new browser windows at the drop of the hat is annoying, but changing the current content of my browser window without permission or warning is far worse!