Cesium and World Wind - Compare and Contrast



Cesium and World Wind - Compare and Contrast

Introduction

Developments in the field of internet and its related features has unleashed the horizons for endless opportunities for the Information Technology workforce as well as IT personnel. Both products are quite popular for providing live maps on the web browser. Cesium has a quite common JavaScript library which is used for the creation of 2D maps as well as 3D globes using the very same web browser without even using a plugin. One thing, which is quite common in both the software, is that they are open source in nature and are free for the non-commercial customer. On the other hand, the NASA World Wind has its own advantages.

Discussion

The paper will look into numerous ways to look into the matter for making the critical decision for choosing Cesium or Wind World. Each of the open source software are quite good in their spheres of application, but there are some characteristics which will show that Cesium is far more better than Wind World. There are various implications and problems associated with Wind World, and this makes it less preferable to be used. However, before going any further a brief description about these software together with their core components will provide quite better insight to look into the problem and make the optimum decision for choosing the best among the rest.

Agi Cesium

Cesium is the most common open source software for the development of 2D maps together with the 3D globes by the help of web browsers even without the use of plugin. Moreover, it makes use of WebGL for the hardware-accelerated graphics. Furthermore, it has remarkable features of facilitating the cross-browser, as well as cross platform for enhancing the dynamic visualizations. It has an Apache 2.0 license and is available free for the commercial as well as non-commercial users and/or clients.

Cesium is also used to depict the skier's track using the 3D globe having 10m National Elevation Dataset terrain. Moreover, it also offers the high-resolution imagery powered by Bing. Here, the videos would be synchronized using skier's location or position and thus play a vital role in the animating visualization horizons. Apart from that, the billboards are used to show the skier's existing position and also provide the location-based information of available data (Cesium, 2013).

NASA World Wind

World Wind is powered by NASA and is quite useful free and open source applications. Additionally, it has API-based Software Development Kit which is widely used for providing a number of virtual world services together with its applications. It is also written using a cross-platform Java which enables the ease to use environment for optimizing the performance of the system. Moreover, the application is quite popular for the swift creation of interactive visualization in the 4D world.

World Wind offers a great deal of advantages for providing numerous breadths for generation of functionalities far beyond various other virtual globes. It also provides the dynamic analysis as well as ...