Visualize Earth in a real-time 3D perspective

Earth3D enables you to have your own personal planetarium at home. Simply copy this tool to your hard drive – no installation required – and be ready to enjoy great views from our planet while sitting right in front of your computer.

Earth3D grabs spatial imagery from NASA, USGS, CIA and other resources and displays them on a simply-designed interface. You can change between different views and locations by using the categorized list on the left side of the interface, while viewing images themselves on the right side. While the virtual trip in Earth3D can be quite fun, bear in mind that this is no Google Earth, so don’t expect to be able to see your home from outer space.

Earth3D features some interesting extras such as the ability to capture images or even record a small video while you’re moving around the Earth or zooming in and out – just with your mouse. However, there’s one big problem that prevented us from giving Earth3D a better score, and that is its incredible slowness when loading pictures.

Earth3D includes a beautiful collection of images from our planet in 3D perspective, but unfortunately takes way too long to display them.

Earth3D is a program that visualizes the earth in realtime in a 3D view. It uses data from NASA, USGS, the CIA and the city of Osnabrück. I would like to thank these organisations to allow me to use their data! The program is available as binary for Linux, MacOS X and Windows under the GPL license.

The program’s features are:

• viewing the earth as a whole
• zooming in until countries, cities and even single houses become visible (if I had such maps, so this is currently limited to the city of Osnabrück, Germany)
• embedding external data like current earthquake positions or cloud data