The Marvel of Marble

Marble is one of the initiatives that are part of the KDE Education project. This application provides several different "skins" to a 3D rendering of the Earth, ranging from temperature maps to very detailed street maps based off OPENSTREET MAPS.

Up until recently, I knew very little about this cool application, so I want to share a bit about it today. The project has its own SITE including plenty of information about Marble both for users and developers. I encourage you to take a quick look, the site is well designed and includes lots of interesting stuff.

I wanted to put together a quick demo, a short video highlighting just a few Marble features. Note that I only used a couple of the many "skins" available, but each of those views would display information specific to it. In this case I only used the satellite view and the openstreet view.

NOTE: The video was recorded with decent quality, so I recommend watching it with 720p resolution and in full screen mode.



Marble is a great application which provides lots of interesting information. From planning an upcoming trip to beholding the Earth at night, there are lots of things we can do with it. It is lots of fun, if only for just being able to rotate the planet at will. ;-)

Many might be thinking about Google Earth as a similar, probably more popular application that offers similar features, and they wouldn't be far from the truth. Of course, there are differences in what each offers, but most importantly, Marble is and encourages the use of open source software and maps.

Give it a go and have fun!