Discovery Channel launched a cool rich Internet application today, Earth Live, that lets you view the earth with overlays of information like weather or environmental data. The center of the application is a 3D earth which you can interact with and spin around.
Discovery Channel launched a cool rich Internet application today, Earth Live, that lets you view the earth with overlays of information like weather or environmental data. The center of the application is a 3D earth which you can interact with and spin around. Then you can use the tabs in the lower right hand corner to add layers of information to the globe. There's a ton of data there in two formats; pre created stories and all the data they have available. The pre created layers/stories are things like the recent tornadoes or the state of the Biosphere. The regular layers are where things get really fun. They've got cloud data, rainfall, sea surface temperature, nitrogen dioxide and others so that you can layer these on top of one another and look for correlations in a very interactive and visible way. The picture below is looking at the rainfall and cloud cover in Seattle.....surprise, surprise.
Discovery Channel used EffectiveUI to work on the application so it has a lot of polish and is a well designed user interface. In talking to Anthony Franco, the founder and CEO of EffectiveUI, he said he wanted to do a content first approach so the earth is at the center of the application and everything else radiates from that. Another cool feature is the ability for Discovery Channel to mark items on the globe. Using a feed of stories with longitude and latitude coordinates you can see on your map things like what's happening with the Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf Expedition. The story links back to the blog so the RIA does a great job of helping users get deeper into the site.
As with anything nowadays, they have a Facebook application so you can take your creations with you and embed them on your Facebook page. You can also take any of your custom layer arrangements and share them on a blog. This application is a lot of fun to play around with and the it's a great way to provide a wealth of data. From a technical standpoint the EffectiveUI team said that what they're doing is overlaying video on top of the 3D globe. While I'm a fan of 3D interfaces I haven't seen a ton of great use cases yet. This one is one of them.
