Innovation at the search major Yahoo continues with recent unveiling of a mashup for news on a 3D map of earth as it happens around the globe. Dubbed NewsGlobe, the new feature that allows users to watch news on a three dimensional model of earth.
An excerpt from the PC Advisor on NewsGlobe
“For each story location, we draw a marker object and place it in the proper position on a sphere representing the Earth,” Shuman said. “The display is calculated and drawn in real time. This allows us to animate the view over time and even lets the user change the view by interacting with the objects in the scene.”
The news tool works in an interactive or automatic mode and makes use of News feeds, Yahoo maps and ActionScript libraries.
There is the fact that this feature is more of a proof of concept and does not represent any ground breaking technology. There a lot more applications that can perhaps take off from here. The product competes with Google’s mashup offerings. The tool could be also used as a desktop standalone thanks to integration with Adobe’s AIR.