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The visualization of socio‐economic GIS data using virtual reality tools
Author(s) -
MARTIN DAVID,
HIGGS GARY
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9671.1996.tb00050.x
Subject(s) - vrml , visualization , virtual reality , computer science , geovisualization , context (archaeology) , data science , data visualization , human–computer interaction , creative visualization , information visualization , geography , data mining , archaeology
This paper addresses two issues: the use of ‘realistic’ environments for the visualization of socio‐economic data, and the use of virtual reality tools for the exploration of data from existing GIS databases. ‘Realistic’ is here used in a narrow sense to imply the reconstruction of real‐world scenes in which major components of the physical environment are reconstructed to facilitate geographical visualization. A review of visualization techniques for geographically‐referenced 3‐D data is presented, and the translation of an existing urban GIS database into virtual reality modelling language (VRML) demonstrated for a study area in Cardiff, UK. This work shows that the export of conventional 2‐D GIS data into virtual reality toolkits can be relatively straightforward, and offers exciting new avenues for visualization and exploration. We argue that some of the parameters of the true scene such as colour, building shape, and texture may be directly modified in order to represent otherwise unobservable socio‐economic characteristics, in the spirit of exploratory data analysis. These issues are of particular importance in the context of current advances towards the dynamic linkage of GIS and virtual reality modelling.