Today Don Brutzman from the Naval Postgraduate School announced X3D Earth, a National Science Foundation funded initiative aimed at building a standards-based 3D Earth usable by governments, industry, scientists, academia and the general public.

Ping is proud to announce our membership of the X3D Earth Working Group, and our participation in the the initial Requirements Workshop to be held at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California USA from 14-15 November 2006.

3D cities and other building information models are the core of Ping's mission to visualise the planet. These projects are simply too resource-intensive to be effectively developed by any isolated group or single company. Industry standards such as X3D Earth, and strong standards bodies like the Web3D Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium are crucial to the success of any such effort.

X3D Earth is an initiative aimed at building a standards-based 3D Earth usable by governments, industry, scientists, academia and the general public. X3D mappings of world terrain, cartography and imagery will be made available for use in any scene, making it easy to geospatially reference and share X3D models. Open standards, the Web architecture, XML languages and open protocols will be used throughout. Both commercial and open-source software codebases will be able to utilize these best practices and contribute to these shared assets.