Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Re-visiting the Use of Surrogate
Walks for Exploring Local
Geographies Using
Non-immersive Multimedia
William Cartwright
School of Mathematical and Geospatial Science, RMIT University
Surrogate travel (or sometimes referred to as movie maps) is the term given to the use of
interactive multimedia products that allow users to 'travel' through environments. They are
built with a variety of multimedia products, but they have in common the goal of providing
tools that allow buildings, towns, cities and natural environments to be appreciated and
understood without actually 'being there'.
This chapter describes surrogate travel and gives, by way of background, a brief description
of two key surrogate travel cartographically related products - the
Aspen Movie Map
and
the
Domesday
project. It then explores other forms of surrogate travel packages that have
been built with non-immersive multimedia, discrete and distributed. Then it describes
surrogate travel products developed by the author: the
GeoExploratorium
, the
Townsville
GeoKnowledge
project and two Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) products - the
Jewell Area prototype
and the
Melbourne Historical Buildings Demonstration product
. Finally,
it provides a synopsis of the results from evaluations undertaken to ascertain the effectiveness
of this approach for imparting a better understanding of local geographies.
6.1 Introduction
'Surrogate travel', or 'moviemaps;, is the ability to move around, allowing the user to laterally
move through a recorded or created place (Mediamatic, 2004). This has been achieved by
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