NOAA View Data Exploration Tool

I'd love to make a DIY spherical globe display, even if it were quite limited compared to the official SOS model. I imagine setting up the projection is the most difficult aspect... anyone have resources on the matter?

I used to volunteer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the Space Odyssey section. They have had one of these systems there for several years now, so one of my main tasks was to present data displayed on the sphere and offer explanations/answer questions. The system we had used about 4 projectors with the sphere, with images synced to make the projections aligned. The set up we had wasn't perfect (it didn't completely cover the bottom pole). However, we had a couple of Wii controllers set up to allow rotation, panning, and timescaling of the projected images, to make up for this. On the whole we had a lot of cool animations to show the visitors and it was really enjoyable showing that data. The biggest problem was getting (younger) visitors to not try to constantly touch the sphere.

My understanding is that this system has become very common for museums showing space or earth science content. It is a neat format to use, and individual museums can set up their own controls for setting up individual animations, creating playlists, and setting up controls for manually operating the system if they use it in shows or presentations, etc. If you have your own data you can put in up on the SOS; we were always looking for the cool things that noaa and sometimes other museums would put up.

I help run the Science on a Sphere systems at the Science Museum of Minnesota. As a matter of fact we just hosted the user's conference, bringing people together from all over the US, Mexico, and various parts of Asia who run these systems. It's a fun network of scientist, educators, and museum exhibits people.

Because the network is aimed at a technically and scientifically diverse community community the data catalog is actually well organized and mostly easy to understand. I'm continually telling data viz friends to check out the resources in there for their non sphere projects:

http://sos.noaa.gov/Datasets/index.html

Fun fact: NOAA just installed the 100th SOS system.

It's Mapserver [http://mapserver.org/]. At NOAA, if the license cost is $0, its good.

...and don't forget Nasa's Java SDK, World Wind, which is specifically designed for this type of data. One of the first projecs I worked on, in order to learn Java, was a simple project using world wind. It's a really fun tool.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/