Google Earth ... ?

This is an interesting project displaying multiple Google Earth applications on the display wall and control them to act as if they are part of a single application.

Each display wall runs single/multiple instances of Google Earth and through our small application sitting in the control node and all display nodes, all instances of Google Earth are controllerd.

How?

Since we do not have the source code of the Google Earth, it is not possible to control it by any conventional method. However, Google Earth has a [well] documented API, COM API for Windows and AppleScript API for Mac OS X, to give users the basic control. We developed a simple application that retrieves/set the current postion of the Google Earth, such as latitude and longitude. The application in the control node retrives the position information from its Google Eartn and send the information to all display node. The application in each display node convert the position information based on its tile coordinates, e.g. second-column-third-row tile, and set the position of its Google Earth.

What's the point?

For start, this is not a single Google Earth blown up to the 50 displays, meaning that this is not Google Earth with a small screen (2000x2000 pixels)  blown up to 200MPixels. Each Google Earth in the display node runs at the full resolution of the monitor. The amount of detail is astonishing.

So, what's the point?

This research is the basic step towards implementing a monitoring system for various geological data sets. Since Google Earth has the ability to overlay XML files on top of itself, many researchers have been implementing ways to utilize Google Earth as a visualiization platform. Our research is to improve the quality of such visualization by providing a simply largest and highest resolution possible with the display wall such as HIPerWall.