Earth Live is  an application that EffectiveUI has created in collaboration with Discovery channel. The application helps people to learn the world by engaging them with a more effective UI, so complex information such as climate change can be digestible by a regular person.

The application uses digital imagery so the user can interactively create a climate picture of the Earth. The UI offers several layers and you can load the content of the layer (i.e. rain) onto the 3D image of the globe.  You can load not only the images but the videos on top of the 3D image of Earth and see, for example the movement of clouds in a selected geographical area.

This application Earth Live has been developed in Flex 3 with Away 3D imaging software.  The back-end data are provided by Discovery channel in the form if the XML files on the daily basis.



Major climate-related news can be shown on the globe image using colored pins, which makes it really easy for anyone to visualize the region and read about the news.

The most challenging part of this application that folks from EffectiveUI had resolve was placing the video on top of the Earth image. They had to slice the video into a stack of separate   images, compress them, place on the Earth image and then loop through them to recreate the video motion.

The other  challenge was presented by Flex Builder 2 that has issues while compiling  multiple projects having cross references.  Flex 3 helped solving this issue.  The final size of the .swf of this application is about 600Kb.

The text of the official press release is on the next page.