This past Christmas I was one of the lucky ones who got a Nintendo Wii. In addition to its unbelievable interactive games I was really impressed with the weather channel that is offered when the Wii has an Internet connection.

Their interface allows you to zoom out from your current city to a global view, see some weather information, and interact with the globe. My immediate thoughts were "what a cool interface this would make for a Rich Internet Application". Fast forward a month or so and I get the news that EffectiveUI has been working on a very similar interface for data visualization but, has taken it much further.

Last week I was fortunate enough to have been given a demo and walkthrough of a new Discovery Channel Rich Internet Application built by EffectiveUI. The demo was given by Randy Reiland, (senior vice president, Digital Media, Discovery Communications), Anthony Franco (president, EffectiveUI), and RJ Owen (senior developer, EffectiveUI).

The application called Earth Live is a very interactive application centered around a 3D globe of the earth. The concept is pretty simple, although it is pretty evident that the development of the user interface was very challenging.

Earth Live was created with Adobe Flex 3 and was built to run on Adobe Flash Player 9. Through 3D rendering utilizing the AWAY3D 3D engine for Flash, EffectiveUI was able to build an interface which allows users to add visual data layers to the globe in real time. These layers include items like the cloud layer, rainfall layer, sea surface temperatures, and even world news.

During the demo, I was first shown the world news layer which when activated, added push pins in the locations on the globe where news was occurring. These push pins included tool tips for additional information about the news event.

Next, the cloud and rainfall layers were dragged onto the globe, which were then rendered as a layer over the globe allowing the user to see precipitation throughout the world. The sea surface temperatures were dropped onto the globe allowing the user to see ocean temperatures visually through color gradients.

In addition to the previous examples, Earth Live also has the ability to show world events as a video overlay to the globe. The example I was shown was the events of Hurricane Katrina. A video of the event was added to the globe showing the massive weather event as it progress through the Gulf of Mexico towards the U.S. shore. Even while the video was playing the globe was still completely interactive allowing the user to see how Katrine effected other parts of the world. Technically, this was a pretty impressive piece of functionality.

One of the coolest things about this type of application is the ability to drop multiple layers onto the globe and see where correlation occur. Think about how an event like a volcano eruption can effect the weather events of the entire globe or how ocean temperatures and events like El Niño and La Niña effect the hurricane season.

To fuel the explosion of the social networking community, Earth Live allows its users to share, collaborate, and inform by offering the ability to embed and Earth Live widget into blogs and sites like MySpace and Facebook.

This provides an easy way for a user to create a view of the globe and share this view with others through the use of this widget.

An in all, I was very impressed with the demonstration and believe it will probably be another award winner for EffectiveUI. Congratulations to both the Discovery Channel and EffectiveUI for creating Earth Live.

Read more from Rich Tretola.