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Virtual Environments and Augmented Reality
Published in Terry A. Slocum, Robert B. McMaster, Fritz C. Kessler, Hugh H. Howard, Thematic Cartography and Geovisualization, 2022
Terry A. Slocum, Robert B. McMaster, Fritz C. Kessler, Hugh H. Howard
Personalized displays refer to displays for individuals such as those found on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or phone. Although the term desktop display normally has been used rather than personalized display, we argue that the increasing capability to create sophisticated visualizations on a variety of personal devices makes personalized displays a more appropriate term. Personalized displays traditionally have been the most common approach for depicting VEs. Software packages for creating and interacting with 3-D VEs on personalized devices can be divided into two groups: those that display a relatively small portion of Earth's surface (the base map is essentially a 2-D environment, although the symbols extend in the third dimension), and those that display either the entire Earth or a substantial portion of it (known as virtual globes or virtual worlds). Examples of the former include ArcGIS's ArcScene, Visual Nature Studio, Blender, and SketchUp. Examples of virtual globes include ArcGIS's ArcGlobe,2 Google Earth, and NASA WorldWind.
Research of Integrated Marine Environment Information Support and Forecast System
Published in Lin Mu, Lizhe Wang, Mingwei Wang, Information Engineering for Ports and Marine Environments, 2020
Lin Mu, Lizhe Wang, Mingwei Wang
World Wind is an open-source geographic software launched by NASA and includes World WindDesktop, World WindJavaSDK and World Wind. Net. It is a 3-D visual virtual globe, which presents the images provided by NASA, USGS and other WMS service providers via a 3-D earth model. Its data source includes global satellite images provided by LandSAT-7, 0.25 to 1 m detailed image data of North America and European cities provided by USGS, precise image data of key cities around the globe provided by SRTM, disaster-monitoring data from around the globe provided by MODIS, the worldwide temperature data, administrative boundary, place name and label data provided by GLOBE (covers buildings of European and American countries and countryside of China). Featured with a built-in 3-D engine, Desktop enables user to view the 3-D maps of various places in a fast and convenient way and provides an online database. By integrating WMS (web map service) function, it uses not only data from NASA but also data and intelligent image database management offered by other map service providers on the internet to achieve fast retrieval.
WiMAX Services: The Future
Published in Amitabh Kumar, Mobile Broadcasting with WiMAX: Principles, Technology, and Applications, 2014
Geographical information systems (GIS) are now evolving to full-fledged Geowebs characterized by the capability to zoom down to individual buildings. This is the result of individual identification of objects in satellite imagery and linkage to their ground-based information which can include complete details of the interiors. Geoweb is essentially a convergence of location-based information with information available on the web. Virtual globe sites such as Google Earth®, World Wind (NASA), or Yahoo maps® are now on the verge of emerging with new capabilities. Geoweb information is most useful in the mobile environment and technologies such as WiMAX can not only enable a complete 3D environment but also enhance it with user participation and uploaded 3D information.
Digital earth: yesterday, today, and tomorrow
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2023
Alessandro Annoni, Stefano Nativi, Arzu Çöltekin, Cheryl Desha, Eugene Eremchenko, Caroline M. Gevaert, Gregory Giuliani, Min Chen, Luis Perez-Mora, Joseph Strobl, Stephanie Tumampos
Since Al Gore’s speech in 1998, several virtual globes have been released by industry (Google Earth, Microsoft Bing, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, Virtual-Geo, etc.) and public agencies (e.g. NASA released an open-source version named WorldWind). However, while the success of Google Earth has been used to argue that the original vision has been achieved, we believe that a virtual globe is far from a complete DE as argued by Grossner (2007) in his article Is Google Earth ‘Digital Earth’? Defining a vision’, where he wrote ‘Digital Earth has been and will be applied to many efforts and products and has come to represent a very loosely organized international effort to build comprehensive digital representations of Earth. However, nearly all organizations self-identified as working on Digital Earth-related projects are addressing only aspects of such representations particular related technologies, or geographical regions. The potential breadth and depth of a comprehensive Digital Earth is so vast as to make a complete specification unwarranted and probably impossible.
A binocular parallel rendering method for VR globes
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2020
Wumeng Huang, Jing Chen, Mengyun Zhou
Figure 1 shows the concepts and relationships of virtual reality, virtual globes and VR globes. As shown in Figure 1 (a), virtual reality, generally refers to head-mounted virtual reality (Cordeil et al. 2017). It simulates a variety of human perception functions including visual, auditory and tactile by interactive devices such as head-mounted displays and hand controllers, which can make users fully immerse themselves in the virtual world (Skarbez, Frederick, and Whitton 2018; Hruby, Ressl, and de la Borbolla Del Valle 2019). As shown in Figure 1 (b), virtual globes, represented by Google Earth, is the new generation of 3D-GIS systems, which can realize the unified management and visualization of global spatial data by the simulating of the earth (Cozzi and Ring 2011). VR globes, a combination of virtual reality and virtual globes (Käser, Parker, and Bühlmann 2016; Käser et al. 2017; Huang and Chen 2019), makes user can interaction with global spatial data via natural behavior (Figure 1 (c-d))).
A procedural footprint enhancement of global topographic surface with multiple levels of detail
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2020
Designs suitable for digital representations of Earth have many requirements and face many challenges depending on the purpose of their application. A common requirement of Digital Earth applications is to provide a universal means to integrate, visualize, explore, and analyze data related to any location on Earth at an arbitrary geographic scale and perspective. This common yet complex requirement initially evolved from advancements in computer graphics and the development of so-called virtual globes. Virtual globes are specialized in the visual exploration of geographic locations through graphical models of topographic surfaces integrated with satellite and aerial imagery. They became useful in practice for communication and education purposes as manifested by commercial technologies such as Keyhole, which became Google Earth, or GeoFusion, which was used in ArcGlobe. However, representations used by virtual globes for the topographic surfaces (Lindstrom et al. 1998; Faust et al. 2000; Aasgard and Sevaldrud 2001; Cignoni et al. 2003) proved to have issues integrating with other data representations including those suitable for analysis. This inability to integrate with models supporting analysis makes original virtual globe technology of negligible importance for traditional geospatial industries including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Building Information Modelling (BIM).