Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
environment. Knowledge of space is hard-wired into us, insubstantial and invisible; space is
yet somehow there and here, penetrating all around us. Space for most of us hovers between
ordinary, physical existence and something given. Thus it alternates in our minds between
the analytical and the absolutely given (Benedikt, 1996). Our interpretation of space and the
resulting sense of location and place that is engendered influence our perception of space in
both real and digital terms.
Bell (2006) identifies three different kinds of space: visual, informational and perceptual.
Visual space is unsurprisingly all that we can see. It is the array of objects that surround us
creating, when viewed collectively, our environment. Each of the objects in any such space
has a multitude of different attributes, from variations in light and colour to reflectivity.
These objects create a reality which is a fully immersive environment in cartesian space,
space that can be interrupted and explored in three dimensions. If these objects are broken
down to singular levels, then each can be viewed as being made up of a combination of
primitives. Primitives in turn are a collection of graphic tokens such as points, lines and
polygons, forming a two- or three-dimensional arrangement, and it pays us to think of visual
space populated by these tokens (Mitchell, 1994). If these points, lines and polygons can be
recreated in digital space, along with their attributes, then digital space can mimic sufficient
aspects of reality in terms of the urban dimensions necessary to create what we have called
the visual city.
Informational space can be seen as an overlay to visual space and it is in this space that
we communicate and receive information. From urban signage to oral communication, in-
formation is communicated in visual space. In terms of the visual city, information should
not be viewed as a separate space but an additional attribute or in more prosaic terms a
new layer. Digital information takes the form of an embedding of data within digital space.
This combination of informational and visual space can be seen as forming the basis for
Google Earth and other digital globes. With the addition of user-friendly communication
to convey such informational space, an overlap occurs with the third form of space, that
of social or perceptual space. Social space defines the user's identity and role in relation to
other users in the social environment. In digital space, the social dimension is increasingly
important and this is seen in the rise of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and
Twitter, to name but a few. Of interest is the fact that these social spaces allow either the
creation of visual space in terms of multi-user, three-dimensional, environments such as
the virtual world Second Life or more direct mashups which combine geo-located pho-
tographs of general users as displayed and accessed through Flickr within Google Maps.
These applications are the key to the Visual City and we will come back to them in more
detail later.
9.2 Creating place and space
In our research group, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), we have built a three-
dimensional model of Greater London which we consider represents a Visual City. The
production of the model has only been made possible due to the development of three-
dimensional GIS and related relevant tools in our case ESRI's ArcScene, three-dimensional
Studio Max and various online visualization packages, most notably Google Earth. A reoc-
curring theme in the development of such three-dimensional city models is the way in which
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