Marble

Version 0.7.1
© 2005-2009 The Marble Project

Marble is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Version 2.
 

For a short introduction into Marble you might want to have a look at the 
slides of our presentation about Marble at State of the Map 2008.

For Users: Marble Desktop Globe

Streetmap of Linköping in Sweden

Marble is a Virtual Globe and World Atlas that you can use to learn more about Earth: You can pan and zoom around and you can look up places and roads. A mouse click on a place label will provide the respective Wikipedia article.

Of course it's also possible to measure distances between locations or watch the current cloud cover. Marble offers different thematic maps: A classroom-style topographic map, a satellite view, street map, earth at night and temperature and precipitation maps. All maps include a custom map key, so it can also be used as an educational tool for use in class-rooms. For educational purposes you can also change date and time and watch how the starry sky and the twilight zone on the map change.

In opposite to other virtual globes Marble also features multiple projections: Choose between a Flat Map ("Plate carré"), Mercator or the Globe.

The best of all: Marble is Free Software / Open Source Software and promotes the usage of free maps. And it's available for all major operating systems (Linux/Unix, MS Windows and Mac OS X).

For Developers: Marble Widget

Using Marble Widget in Qt4 Designer

Marble is a light weight generic geographical map component for use in your own Qt 4.x / C++ application. It is provided as a library, a QWidget and a KDE 4 KPart and hence can easily get integrated with KDE 4 or Qt 4 applications. By default MarbleWidget shows the earth as a sphere but doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration (No OpenGL).

• Marble uses a minimal free dataset that can be used offline. Currently the total amount of data that is meant to be shipped is about 15 MB.
• Marble runs decently without hardware acceleration. It just uses Qt's Arthur API as a painting backend and does NOT use OpenGL. Extending it later on to support OpenGL as well shouldn't be hard however we don't consider that the primary focus. Depending on your hardware and the maps being displayed framerate is approximately 5-30 fps.
• Marble uses vector as well as bitmap data: Currently it uses the old MWDB II data combined with elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
• Marble displays the world map as 3D a sphere, because it's more fun to use and less subject to distortion (So with regard to that it's just like NASA WorldWind, Earth3D and Google Earth)
• Marble should start up almost instantly. Currently it "cold" starts fully within 2-5 seconds. On each subsequent start it takes about one second.

Latest News

Last update: 2009-03-05