The Whole Globe is a compact 3D Earth viewer designed for Microsoft® .NET Framework for Silverlight®. Prospect the planet and find possibilities of visualization of information distributed all over the world within a built-in 3D viewer featuring freely-rotatable texture-mapped* earth model.
After a while with preloading process, the 3D Earth model comes into the screen and viewer gets ready. The model and/or the camera in the viewer can be controlled via either mouse or keyboard actions as follows.
Control the Earth by mouse: To rotate the Earth, mouse-drag-and-drop on the screen. In this viewer, the Earth's axis is not fixed at all. Therefore you can freely rotate the spherical model along arbitrary geodesic lines. To zoom the camera, mouse-wheel on the screen. By wheeling with mouse-pointer placed on some target point on the surface, you can zoom view directly toward that point.
Control the Earth by keyboard: Use arrow keys for rotation. And use +/- keys for zoom.
Optionally, you can change visual effects by the checkboxes at the bottom-right corner, such as [1] pseudo-shading (simulating diffusive + specular scattering), [2] atomosphic scattering around the edge of the globe and [3] texture image type (bicolored or fullcolored).
When you have "Placemark" checkbox marked, randomly distributed dot-marks (100 points) appear on the surface. The sample above demonstrates minimal user-interactions with placemarks; By hovering the mouse pointer over one of them, a tooltip simply popups to inform you of the latitude and longitude at the point.