Earthquake 3D

Earthquake 3D provides a fascinating look at recent seismic activity around the globe. While the program provides a great deal of information and options, it suffers from its complete lack of direction.

We were initially impressed with the interface. The controls all looked basic, but soon we discovered that the Help file didn't do more than give a description of the product, and some actions we wanted to perform were not intuitive enough. The program itself was a spinning globe with magnitudes and the traditional multiring circles indicating earthquakes. We appreciated how the control panel let us filter quakes by severity and changed the globe's look to better see the quakes. This all functioned great, but zooming in was impossible. We learned with ease how to rotate the globe using our mouse, but could not get a closer look, even though it's the first thing the description promised. After several fruitless minutes we grew frustrated and gave up. On a more interesting note, the program did have a feature that updated the globe with the newest quakes. But this wasn't enough to rescue this program from its unfortunate lack of direction.

Earthquake 3D is a freeware program. The program comes as a compressed file. Even though we loved most aspects of this program, its lack of direction makes it hard to recommend.