3D Globe Visualization Platforms

In a January 1998 speech titled "The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st century," then–U.S. Vice President Al Gore articulated a vision of a multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet that anyone could navigate and layer with data, a concept that predated the computing power and bandwidth needed to realize it at consumer scale by several years. That vision materialized commercially only once satellite bandwidth, GPU rendering, and global elevation datasets such as SRTM converged in the following decade.