About


WorldWind is an open source API for visualizing and hosting geospatial data. Our client libraries, available for Android devices, the browser, or the desktop, provide developers a quick and easy utility for visualizations of 3D globe, map and geographical information. Our server kit extends the functionality of GeoServer to provide an end to end geospatial solution.

Organizations across the world use WorldWind to monitor weather patterns, visualize cities and terrain, track the movement of planes, vehicles and ships, analyze geospatial data, and educate people about the Earth.

Because WorldWind is completely open source, extending the API is simple and easy to do. This creates a powerful platform for giving any application the means to express, manipulate and analyze spatial data. WorldWind technology can be incorporated into a wide range of applications, including, Windows, Mac, Linux, web, and mobile devices.

Curated by NASA, work on WorldWind began in 2002 and was released under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA). The project was ported to Java in 2006, and in November 2009 was awarded NASA Software of the Year. In 2018 Web WorldWind 0.9.0 was released under Apache 2.0 License. It has developed a global community of users, from government, education, the non-profit sector, as well as private industry. HTML5 and Android versions have been added as well as the server kit for hosting data.

WorldWind is different from a 3D globe like Google Earth because it is not an application. Instead, it is an SDK (software development kit) that software engineers can use to build their own applications. WorldWind provides a geographic rendering engine for powering a wide range of projects, from satellite tracking systems to flight simulators.

With WorldWind taking care of the hard work of visualizing geographic data (generating terrain from elevation models, selecting and displaying images from imagery servers, etc), software engineers are free to focus on the solving the problems specific to their own domains and quickly building whatever geospatial applications they choose.





Server maintenance notice

Dear WorldWind Community,

The geospatial data services that feed WorldWind clients by default with data are undergoing maintenance. Outages between 2 to 4 hours per server may occur during the month of April 2023.

As always, if you have any inquiries or concerns, please contact us at:

arc-worldwind@mail.nasa.gov