High performance mobile 3D GIS- IVJ/WWJ on Android

The vision of an integrated Earth observation system to help protect and sustain the planet and its inhabitants is significant and timely, and thus has been identified recently by many organizations. Clearly, the societal benefits of global integrated monitoring are many: to understand how environment and humans are linked, to protect and monitor resources (water supply, weather, oceans) and predict and adapt to their change, to provide for sustainable development, and to reduce costs/impacts of disasters and provide for an effective and intelligent response.

The requirements of such a system are that it be able to collect observations (remote sensing/satellite data and in-situ sensors), manage data (archive, model), interface with users (user- and context-specific display), and that it enhance human capacity by providing for research/training, collaboration and ultimately decision support. Further, in order to be effective, it must also be easily usable by a wide cross section of users, provide for advanced analysis and visualization with interaction and collaboration tools over the Internet; be open source, protocol, and information; and future-proof, modular and extendable as new needs and technologies arise.

However, access to such a system, together with its environmental data at any time or place, remains a challenge within the technical constraints imposed by mobile devices. Limited bandwidth, limited graphical and computing power, and limited screen real estate all provide significant technical hurtles which must be overcome to realize this goal.

This presentation demonstrates an early prototype of a novel technical approach to the display of real-time 3D interactive GIS visualization on mobile devices. The system provides a fully functional version of InteleView (which is built on the NASA WorldWind-Java platform), including access to all 315,000 layers of satellite and aerial imagery, GIS data, live sensor data, and other information from an Android mobile device, running over 3G cellular or WiFi networks with fully interactive, highperformance 3-D graphical response. This will be the first presentation of the research prototype system at a conference and will demonstrate that 3-D, interactive GIS visualization is real, practical, attainable, and soon available.