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Virtual Geographic Environments, edited by Hui Lin and Michael Batty, collects key papers that define the current momentum in GIS and "virtual geographies." Contributions by leading members of the geospatial community to Virtual Geographic Environments illustrate the cutting edge of GIScience, as well as new applications of GIS with the processing and delivery of geographic information through the Web and handheld devices, forming two major directions to these developments. The four-part organization leads from a primer on VGEs to virtual cities and landscapes, interface design and public participation, and finally mobile and networked VGEs. Current topics, such as crowd sourcing and related services, point to the development of new business models that merge proprietary and nonproprietary systems.
Virtual Reality in Geography covers "through the window" VR systems, "fully immersive" VR systems, and hybrids of the two types. The authors examine the Virtual Reality Modeling Language approach and explore its deficiencies when applied to real geographic environments. This is a totally unique book covers all the major uses and methods of virtual reality used by geographers. The authors have produced a CDROM that comes with the book of virtual reality images that will be a fascinating companion to the text. This book will be of great interest to geographers, computer scientists and all those interested in multimedia and computer graphics.
This book reviews and summarizes the development and achievement in cartography and geographic information engineering in China over the past 60 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China. It comprehensively reflects cartography, as a traditional discipline, has almost the same long history with the world's first culture and has experienced extraordinary and great changes. The book consists of nineteen thematic chapters. Each chapter is in accordance with the unified directory structure, introduction, development process, major study achievements, problem and prospect, representative works, as well as a lot of references. It is useful as a reference both for scientists and technicians who are engaged in teaching, researching and engineering of cartography and geographic information engineering.
Multi-Agent Geo-Simulation (MAGS) is a modelling paradigm which has attracted a growing interest from researchers and practitioners for the study of various phenomena in a variety of domains such as traffic simulation, urban dynamics, environment monitoring, as well as changes of land use and cover, to name a few. These phenomena usually involve a large number of simulated actors (implemented as software agents) evolving in, and interacting with, an explicit spatial environment representation commonly called Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE). Since a geographic environment may be complex and large-scale, the creation of a VGE is difficult and needs large quantities of geometrical data originating from the environment characteristics (terrain elevation, location of objects and agents, etc.) as well as semantic information that qualifies space (building, road, park, etc.). CurrentMAGS approaches usually consider the environment as a monolithic structure, which considerably reduces the capacity to handle largescale, real world geographic environments as well as agent's spatial reasoning capabilities. Moreover, the problem of path planning in MAGS involving complex and large-scale VGEs has to be solved in real time, often under constraints of limited memory and CPU resources. Available path planners provide agents with obstacle-free paths between two located positions in the VGE, but take into account neither the environment's characteristics (topologic and semantic) nor the agents' types and capabilities. In addition, agents evolving in a VGE lack for mechanisms and tools that allow them to acquire knowledge about their virtual environment in order to make informed decisions. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to automatically generate a semantically-enriched and geometrically-precise representation of the geographic environment that we call Informed Virtual Geographic Environment (IVGE). Our IVGE model efficiently organizes the geographic features, precisely captures the real world complexity, and reliably represents large-scale geographic environments. We also provide a new hierarchical path planning algorithm which leverages the enriched description of the IVGE in order to support agents' reasoning capabilities while optimising computation costs and taking into account both the virtual environment's characteristics and the agents' types and capabilities. Finally, we propos an environment knowledge management approach to support the agents' spatial decision making process while interacting with the IVGE.
"This book provides a comprehensive treatment of collaborative GIS focusing on system design, group spatial planning and mapping; modeling, decision support, and visualization; and internet and wireless applications"--Provided by publisher.
The purpose of this volume is to provide a review and analysis of the theory, research, and practice related to geospatial technologies in social studies education. In the first section, the history of geospatial technologies in education, the influence of the standards movement, and the growth of an international geospatial education community are explored. The second section consists of examples and discussion of the use of geospatial technologies for teaching and learning history, geography, civics, economics, and environmental science. In the third section, theoretical perspectives are proposed that could guide research and practice in this field. This section also includes reviews and critiques of recent research relevant to geospatial technologies in education. The final section examines the theory, research, and practice associated with teacher preparation for using geospatial technologies in education.
"The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media] events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling." -- Choice "... a wide-ranging, quirky and dextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of the global telecommunications network... " -- Times Literary Supplement "... this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." -- The New Statesman "Wark is one of the most original and interesting cultural critics writing today." -- Lawrence Grossberg McKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everyday life under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.
This is the first text to focus on virtual reality applications for design of the built environment. This guide explores the use of virtual reality at the practical level. It provides an overview of industrial applications of virtual reality and explores relevant scientific research. Virtual Reality in the Built Environment is a guide to the practical uses of virtual design, construction, and management. Providing an overview of industrial applications for virtual reality and exploring relevant research, this book is an accessible and innovative resource for architects, designers and built environment professionals--bridging the gap between technological vision and current practice. Author Jennifer Whyte shows how interactive, spatial, real-time technologies can radically improve modelling and communication of ideas, enable partcipation in the design process, and facilitated planning and management at the urban scale. The experience of lead users of virtual reality is used as the basis for understanding its promise and problems. Explanations of the underlying principles of this exciting interactive medium, a discussion of the cognitive, technical and organizational issues it raises, and international case studies illustrating practical applications are all included in this guide. The author also provides a companion web site which provides online learning materials, including test-yourself questions, virtual reality models, and links to relevant sites, making it a valuable design resource and a stimulus for innovation.
This open access book offers a summary of the development of Digital Earth over the past twenty years. By reviewing the initial vision of Digital Earth, the evolution of that vision, the relevant key technologies, and the role of Digital Earth in helping people respond to global challenges, this publication reveals how and why Digital Earth is becoming vital for acquiring, processing, analysing and mining the rapidly growing volume of global data sets about the Earth. The main aspects of Digital Earth covered here include: Digital Earth platforms, remote sensing and navigation satellites, processing and visualizing geospatial information, geospatial information infrastructures, big data and cloud computing, transformation and zooming, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and social media. Moreover, the book covers in detail the multi-layered/multi-faceted roles of Digital Earth in response to sustainable development goals, climate changes, and mitigating disasters, the applications of Digital Earth (such as digital city and digital heritage), the citizen science in support of Digital Earth, the economic value of Digital Earth, and so on. This book also reviews the regional and national development of Digital Earth around the world, and discusses the role and effect of education and ethics. Lastly, it concludes with a summary of the challenges and forecasts the future trends of Digital Earth. By sharing case studies and a broad range of general and scientific insights into the science and technology of Digital Earth, this book offers an essential introduction for an ever-growing international audience.
In recent years, the popularity of virtual worlds has increased significantly and they have consequently come under closer academic scrutiny. Papers about virtual worlds are typically published at conferences or in journals that specialize in something - tirely different, related to some secondary aspect of the research. Thus a paper d- cussing legal aspects of virtual worlds may be published in a law journal, while a psychologist's analysis of situation awareness may appear at a psychology conference. The downside of this is that if you publish a virtual worlds paper at an unrelated conference in this manner you are likely to be one of only a handful of attendees working in the area. You will not, therefore, achieve the most important goal of - tending conferences: meeting and conversing with like-minded colleagues from the academic community of your field of study. Virtual worlds touch on many well-established themes in other areas of science. Researchers from all these fields will therefore be looking at this new, interesting, and growing field. However, to do effective research related to these complex constructs, researchers need to take into account many of the other facets from other fields that impact virtual worlds. Only by being familiar with and paying attention to all these different aspects can virtual worlds be properly understood.