3D World Map, an educational atlas

3D World Map comes to remind us of those spheres that were used at school, although its capacity goes beyond that. It is a balloon that contains much more data that could fit in the globe and atlas; it also includes a screen saver movie tool that can run mp3 music as background.

3D World Map Capabilities

• Contains more than 30,000 records of cities and countries, containing their geographic coordinates and population data. It also agrees to add more data.
• It has an option to activate the day or night; and, according to the system time, shows how it would look like. For the part of the world’s dark night it displays a nighttime lighting.
• It can be seen in full screen, window and floating balloon with everything else transparent.
• Distances can be measured, and accepts metric units.
• Brings some themes as sample, but can be configured as you like using different colors and transparency for different kind of data such as oceans, atmosphere or elevation. The latter may be exaggerated through an interesting display.

Functionality

Quite practical, monitoring tools are floating and can be located anywhere in space.

It can be saved locations assigning a number on the keypad. Practical for moving between places of interest.

Has turning movements, displacement, zoom in and north blocking movements. Unfortunately the changes of these are not very practical, you can have them integrated into the mouse buttons + ctrl, and we must resort to the right button for some transitions.

Conclusion

Not so bad for an application that barely weighs just 6 MB; the data has come from sources such as:

gtopo30, Micro World Data Bank, the World Gazetteer, The CIA World Fact Book 2002, 2004, Blue Marble.

The trial version comes with basic layers, but the premium version lets you download up to 30MB of geographic data. Quite interesting for educational purposes, the paid version goes for $ 29.

Download 3D World Map