メインコンテンツまでスキップ

Project goal

The project's background​

Why we started to develop Re:Earth​

The reason why we originally started to develop Re:Earth is simple: It was to attempt to realize the Digital Earth concept which had been popularized by a speech former US vice president AI Gore gave in 1998.

To date, many people have shared this vision and have developed many interesting things around it in the GIS community. However, given the heavy nature of GIS tools they have typically required a host machine, which would need to be a highly spec PC. More importantly, advanced technological knowledge in GIS would be necessary to handle them. We started this project with a desire to make this digital earth idea accessible and easy to use for everyone.

Once we were satisfied with the foundation we had built, we then decided to release it to the public as OSS, hoping to involve more developers in the project and make it a truly global software that is created by, and used by, people from all over the world.

We hope that many people will come together and grow a great community along with this project.

The goal of the project​

The Re:Earth project's main aim is to develop a chance to allow everyone to visualize any data by using the digital earth easily without any coding.

To make sure we are always aiming at making Re:Earth better and better for the user we have a roadmap that we manage here that outlines new features and QOL improvements we have planned.

Some of the currently planned features are:

  • A tagging system: It allows users to attach special attributes to layers. This feature will allow users to filter objects by tags on the earth and direct focus on specific content more, which would be a great asset for larger projects that might begin to feel a little chaotic.
  • More visualization methods: Polygon, 3D tiles, 3D models, and even map engines.
  • Support for more data formats, external databases, and CMS.
  • A timeline feature: It enables users to visualize their time series data overlaying the digital earth.
  • Real-time collaboration: Re:Earth already has a team feature that allows you to manage the project's team with permissions. However, if two or more team members are working at the same time, changes made by one won't be seen by the other. With these features, users can work together seamlessly.
  • A project template feature: As more features are added to Re:Earth, often what is necessary for one user is not very useful for another. These features help users by show functions only what is needed for the type of project they will create.
  • Formula property: With this Re:Earth can calculate the value which can be used as layer's property.
  • Back-end plugin functionality: Currently, Re:Earth supports front-end plugins which can involve more developers to make external plugins. However, it's only for the front-end. This will allow us to extend Re:Earth's back-end API as well.
  • Performance improvements: As the data being handled increases, more load is on Re:Earth which will keep the users waiting. Refining the performance makes us all happy.

Re:Earth is waiting for more feature requests from you!

If you have any requests or suggestions feel free to create an issue here.