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A whole new tilt on topo maps. NASA WorldWind is a “world viewing” application. It basically lets you look at the earth in lots of different ways from lots of different sources and at any angle in a 3D model. You may have heard of Keyhole (recently acquired by Google), which is also cool and does basically the same thing, but with a few different features (like driving directions and flyovers). Keyhole does have higher resolution images in some areas, and can look up places by address, but WorldWind has many different image overlays and lots more information about the geography, weather, land, and just about everything else. It’s also free and open source, whereas keyhole is expensive and closed.

My favorite part of WorldWind is its topographical map layer. I’m a nature nut, so I get out camping with the family a lot, usually somewhere in Yosemite. On a hike, the topo map is invaluable for getting around. You can always eyeball a slope, but the map tells you more accurately how steep it is (usually). They’re hard to visualize though. WorldWind lets you tilt and pan and see the geography in full 3D. Even better, you can get topos at the highest detail available for anywhere on earth in the program. It’s pretty amazing.

WorldWind also has other very cool features. Seriously. “Cool” is the only way to describe it. It can take animations of satelite weather images (hurricanes, etc) and play them back on the 3D earth. It can display detailed static image data from 5 different satelites plus aerial images, and the “blue earth” image for when you’re zoomed out. It’s a lot of fun to play with and well worth the huge download.