Xplanet is this great program on Linux that does projections of the earth (including all kinds of possible overlays to include things like real time clouds, earthquake activity, and major storms.)  For years I’ve used it as the background image on my Linux desktop.  On the way home last night, while chatting with my friend Trey, it occured to me that through creative use of OpenSim, we could easily do this this in world with dramatic effect.

Below is a couple of screen shots of my 10m globe.  I had to modify the code paths for osSetDynamicTextureURL to get 1024×1024 textures into the pipe, as 512×512 doesn’t actually look good wrapped on a 10m globe.  There is still a bit of work to make this really good (like completing osSetDynamicTextureURL so we don’t need another timing loop in LSL to do refresh), but the initial results are quite nice. 🙂

The circles with numbers are earthquakes in the last 24 hours plus magnitudes (this information comes from the TotalMarker project).

Here you can see the storm track of the named storm Ivan (also from TotalMarker).