NASA World Wind Pick From A Group Of Icons

Question

I am using an IconLayer in NASA World Wind (Java SDK) to show positioned items on a map which works fine except for when several are in a group and start to overlay one another. The display of the icons in a group like that is not so much of a problem as I need to allow the end user to easily select the correct icon in that "pile" easily. A workaround would be to allow for a right-click on an icon in that group would generate a context menu that shows a list of the items in that "pile" so they could select the one they want.

Creating a context menu on right-click is easy enough but I do not see how I could create a buffer from that point to do a simple geometry relationship like "contains" in NASA World Wind. I have searched the API a bit and have not seen anything that looks like it has potential so I was hoping that someone here might now of either how to do this in NASA World Wind or a simple way of including or achieving this functionality.

Answer 1

So it turns out that there is functionality built into NASA World Wind to handle this situation but it is not very straight forward or easy to find in my opinion. After digging more through the SDK there is an example application that details what must be done in order to enable "deep picking". Here is a link to the Deep Picking example application Java Doc:

http://builds.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind-releases/1.4/docs/api/gov/nasa/worldwindx/examples/DeepPicking.html

The key for getting this to work is to ensure that the World Wind Scene Controller has Deep Pick enabled and that Batch Picking is disabled for all layers/renderers that you are interested in getting back as results in the pick list.

A side note on geometry relationships is that there is a class called Sector in NASA World Wind that looks promising for some basic functionality like contains, intersection, union ...

http://builds.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind-releases/1.4/docs/api/gov/nasa/worldwind/geom/Sector.html