Call me crazy, but I love looking at maps. My idea of a good time would be cuddling up with this book and a nice cup of tea.

So I was pretty excited to go to the IN21C Geovisualization With Virtual Globes I presentation.  Researchers across the world are creating beautiful, simple-to-understand maps of huge, complex data sets, from climate change to volcanic activity and deforestation.

One team, led by Paul Hogan at the NASA Ames Research Center, has developed a completely open-source program called World Wind. The application is a visualization tool that lets you view everything from precipitation data to every single building in Slovenia. The neat thing about World Wind is that its open-source platform that lets you customize and extend its capabilities. Let’s say you have some image data in a strange format.