Today, Google announced the launch of a simple 3D visualization platform called the WebGL Globe. The open platform is designed to display large volumes of geographic data on top of a 3D virtual globe, inside your web browser.
Google has provided a couple of examples:
- A visualization of a days worth of queries in Google Search. Spikes are coloured by language. Height represents the volume of queries from that location.
- Secondly, an interactive guide to world population density. Just hover of the dates to switch between visual representations of 1990, 1995 and 2000.
It’s described as a Chrome experiment but presumably should be good for most, modern web browsers.
The official Google Code blog has technical details, and information for developers wanting to publish their own geographic data sets.
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