Grasshoppermind

A little while ago I asked SRI International what had happened to their Digital Earth project. This project was one of the primary reasons that we now have Google Earth, Worldwind, Virtual Earth, etc., and I was interested in knowing a little more about the history. Well, Aaron Heller, who is a researcher at SRI, responded and pointed out this publications list as well as this bit of background:

SRI’s Digital Earth effort was funded by DARPA under a few different research projects over the course of 10 years from 1992 to 2002. The final report shows just how much of what is Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, NASA Worldwind (and more), was originally done on the Digital Earth project. After 10 years, DARPA felt that their work was done and it was time let NGA take over geospatial research. NGA’s approach to is to support work in setting interoperability standards (as with the Open GIS Consortium) and working with commercial companies to develop products that NGA can license and use (e.g. Keyhole, which became Google Earth).

Some of the numbers from the final report are pretty impressive, for example, their proposed Digital Earth allowed for a scaleable tile based distributed storage system that could cope with color imagery of the planet at 1cm resolution requiring 1 petabyte of storage. This is way more that you currently can see on Google Earth and its rivals, although it probably indicates the kind of capabilities enjoyed by the intelligence agencies even now.

They also envisaged a number of different “Geoweb” Clients:

Text Based: …in addition to entering a search criterion, the user would also enter a location for the search. This could be a latitude/longitude coordinate or, more intuitively, a street address or a feature name that can be translated to a geodetic coordinate by using a gazetteer service…

Map-based:…a client that lets users search over a particular geographic region and return the results as a map image with various icons overlaid…

TerraVision: …allows users to navigate in real time through a 3-D graphical representation of a real landscape created from elevation data and aerial images of that landscape…

Geoster: … lets users index photos from around the world and share these with the rest of the world…this type of client could produce a large interest in geographic search…

You should recognise todays descendents easily.