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Both Ogle Earth and the Google Earth Blog share enthusiastic reviews of 3DConnexion's SpaceNavigator input device which allows six degrees of freedom, able to control Google Earth, SketchUp and more to come. From Ogle Earth: "But does it work? Oh yeah. After about 2 minutes my left hand disappeared and I began to mind-meld with Earth. Think Rotate and that's what Earth does. Push in and you zoom in. It's a completely new level of control, and it's completely addictive. The sensitivity is proportionate to your altitude, so at sea level you can work with sub-meter precision. Zoom out and you can traverse the world in a second. Look up above the horizon if you like, or pan, zoom and rotate all at once. You can make yourself queasy without trying very hard."

Spatially Adjusted tells us there is now a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator driver for ESRI ArcMap 9.2. Meanwhile, The Earth is Square tells us NASA World Wind 1.4 is officially supported. Is this newsworthy? Well, judging on this video, it may help ESRI's ArcMap users improve their efficiency in some cases. From the developer in a SA's comment: "This is my own temporary solution until ESRI or 3Dconnxion releases the “official” driver. I just love SpaceNavigator, and I couldn’t wait. I tested this “beta” driver using ArcMap 9.1 and 9.2, and it seems to work."

A few geobloggers previously shared their experience with 3DConnexion's SpaceNavigator. What it is? This input device replaces your mouse allowing you to navigate within virtual globes. Google Earth is supported (even the Mac version with GE 4.1), ArcMap 9.2 and NASA World Wind and even Microsoft's web-based Virtual Earth is supported along with various other apps such as SketchUp. Read more below for my "review".

Logitech announced the SpaceNavigator input device now supports ESRI applications. Here's my own review of the SpaceNavigator last spring. After using it myself, I do believe geoprofessionals can actually improve their efficiency with such a device, and it's fun to use. From this Spatially Adjusted entry: "In ArcMap, you don’t have a 3D view, but it works well for the 2D environment. The zoom/pan/rotate works well for navigating. The rotate function of the SpaceNavigator is a real time saver as you can rotate as easily as panning and zooming. I was very productive using the SpaceNavigator with my left hand and using my mouse with the right. We’ll see how my opinion changes with time, but right now any ArcGIS user can improve their productivity whether or not they use 3D." See also related stories below.

There has been a lot of news going on with Google Earth and Virtual Earth these days, but let's not forget about World Wind. The Earth Is Square blog has a list of new features that's coming in the 0.60 version of WWJava, expected out sometime mid October to November. Here is a feature summary, but head on over to their blog for more details :

• Air space shapes and volumes - think extruded circles, rectangles, lines or path, terrain following or not, connected to the ground or floating in the air.
• OGC Catalog Service support with an example application to query and visualize resources from several servers.
• Compound elevation model that will allow to overlay several elevation data sets
• New iteration of markers and tracks
• A view control layer that provides a GUI to interact with the view
• A visual measure tool and the supporting classes for length and area
• Geometry based surface shapes - like terrain following polylines for surfaces.
• New iteration of the placename layer
• Terrain/Line geometry intersect test

The Earth Is Square blog has screenshots of the upcoming WWJava release. From their blog, the new features are airspace shapes and volumes, terrain conforming or not, distance and Area measuring tool and markers. For more information and more screenshots, please visit the blog.

The Earth Is Square has some information on this. From reading it, it appears it's more like a request for some help. Here is part of their summary : "Tim G from the WorldWind Fourms has been making some nice headway in his sparetime with getting KML support working within WWJava. He has the code available for anyone to try and to make improvements on.

From the Readme file:

Right now there is support for: ploygons (including extruded polygons with holes), lines (including tesselated lines, no extrusion) and points (but only displayed as pushpins). There is no support for overlays, complex(dae) 3d models, regions, animation, etc. It only knows how to read a few things from the KML file. So if you load a file with it and see nothing, that feature is probably just not supported."