EarthBuzz Software has built a 3D engine capable of showing an interactive 160 megapixel NASA Blue Marble rendition with deep zoom in its latest product EarthBuzz Free Weather which runs on the Apple A4 processor at lightning fast speeds.

EarthBuzz Free Weather overlays live satellite weather data and Global Forecasting System image layers, over the NASA Blue Marble high-resolution earth imagery. In addition to the 160 megapixel Blue Marble rendition it also has overlays of animated real-time satellite clouds, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, live weather conditions and Twitter friends using geo-location.

The EarthBuzz engine uses a sophisticated tiling technique innovated by NASA. Instead of using Mercator projection tiles, like our competitors, the EarthBuzz Engine uses a technique known as Tessellated Octahedron Tiling. This gives EarthBuzz superior fidelity around the poles compared to competing virtual earth software.

The satellite cloud layers are currently only 1 megapixel due to bandwidth constraints although it is possible with sponsorship and support that EarthBuzz Software will release a high fidelity satellite cloud layer in an upcoming version.

The live weather condition data, forecast data, animated satellite cloud image layers and global forecast system image layers are made available from CustomWeather, Inc a San Francisco based weather data provider.

Michael Clark, Managing Director of EarthBuzz Software, tells us there is a back-story behind EarthBuzz Free Weather and the EarthBuzz Engine.

“It’s really a statement on the openness of information and respect for the creators and innovators that have made this information available such as NASA and NOAA. There is a huge investment in satellite remote sensing infrastructure for which data is made available to small companies like EarthBuzz Software, giving the potential to innovate and add value. These governmental open data initiatives create a huge downstream benefit that expands and enriches the entire application ecology.”

While EarthBuzz Software is based out of Singapore, the largest proportion of profits from the ad-supported EarthBuzz Free Weather and its companion ad-free paid version EarthBuzz Weather go to companies in the United States such as Apple, Inc, for its iTunes App Store channel, CustomWeather, Inc for its weather data feed and Amazon, Inc who host the cloud computing infrastructure behind the EarthBuzz Free Weather service.

EarthBuzz Software is hugely thankful to those who make their channels, information and infrastructure openly available to international companies such as EarthBuzz Software, based in Sunny Singapore. Apple has given small developers a wonderful opportunity to innovate and create world-class mobile applications.

In recognition of this, the initial release of EarthBuzz Free Weather is first available in the United Sates as a statement on our respect for openness and freedom of information. Europe tends to provide access to satellite weather data at prohibitive costs for small developers whereas the US government believes that opening this information up to innovators creates more downstream economic benefits from value added services. Many other countries such as Singapore and New Zealand have similar open access government data initiatives.

EarthBuzz would love to have the backing of NASA or Twitter. Imagine a mobile app visualizing real-time social network information on the EarthBuzz 3D earth engine. This would allow the potential to see trending topics and global sentiment in real-time with analytics from the Twitter fire-hose. The technology platform is available but EarthBuzz Software needs sponsors and partners to aid with development and cover bandwidth costs for a Twitter fire-hose feed of geo-located tweets. In addition, there are opportunities for visualizing climate change, and as a platform for crisis communication, education and travel.

Michael Clark the founder of EarthBuzz Software has invested 5 man years in engineering time in evenings and weekends to build up the cross-platform EarthBuzz Engine, the EarthBuzz Weather and EarthBuzz Free Weather iPhone and iPad apps along with server-side middleware to transform map projection into tessellated octahedron tiles. EarthBuzz Software now has a completely unencumbered virtual earth code-base using no proprietary components.

The EarthBuzz Engine currently runs on Windows / Linux / MacOS and iOS, is written in cross-platform C++ with OpenGL ES and there is also the potential for an Android version. The EarthBuzz Engine features asynchronous tile loading, time series display and point data visualization capabilities as well.

Please contact Michael Clark, EarthBuzz Software, if your company or organization is interested in sponsoring EarthBuzz Free Weather, licensing the EarthBuzz engine for embedding in branded applications or custom mobile application development based on the EarthBuzz engine.