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.

Ping is sponsoring the Australasian and South-East Asian Reception at SIGGRAPH 2006, the world's premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. If you're attending, come to the International Center at 5pm on Sunday the 30th of July. Attendees will be served complimentary Australian beer (Coopers and James Boags) and wines, and Australian and Singaporean snacks.

The SIGGRAPH 2006 Metaverse Birds of a Feather session is booked for Monday 31st July 9 am - 10 am. At the Boston convention and exhibition center, room 213.

Today MediaMachines is announcing KML2X3D, which converts Google Earth's proprietary 3D format into X3D, the open standard supported by Ping's 3map and planet-earth projects. We can now run our Open Standard virtual cities inside Google Earth's embedded web browser, export Google Earth geometry to standards-capable applications, and more.

Ping has had a long involvement in the standards process led by the Web3D Consortium, in particular contributing to the development of the X3D geospatial profile.

Today we're pleased to announce that we are joining the Consortium as an Organizational Member.

The Consortium provides a framework for organisations and individuals interested in the development of open, royalty-free Web 3D standards to advance the state of the art. We're constantly impressed with the spirit of active cooperation and innovation demonstrated by the members of the Consortium, and are proud to be in their company.

Ping has begun phase two of our project for the NSW Department of Housing, developing Spatial Decision Support tools to help the Department manage their portfolio of almost 130,000 properties across the state.

Chris Thorne, Ping's Technical Director, has written a paper for the journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence. It describes the rendering problems introduced by position dependent errors and the floating origin architecture in more detail.

Ping in association with JBDD delivered our final recommendations to the City of Sydney Council's 3D City Working Group today, providing a solid foundation for their virtual city strategy.

If your organisation has significant geospatial data visualisation needs, then please feel free to contact us to discuss your requirements.

Ping's Technical Director Chris Thorne will be presenting a session on Large Scale Distributed Virtual Environments at the 2005 International Conference on CYBERWORLDS in Singapore on Thursday 24th November.