The Visual City - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 188

Figure 9.4 Panoramic images in Google Earth

a sphere and then moving the viewing field to the spheres centre, or nodal point, the view
straightens out the lines in the image providing an exact replica of the human eye's line of
sight from the location. The ability to drape onto a sphere allows the panorama in to be
depicted in x - y - z three-dimensional space, and it can be embedded in other models of the
Visual City. Figure 9.4 illustrates a panoramic sphere embedded within Google Earth.
The images are placed on the reverse face of the sphere, allowing the user to look inside;
while wrapping around a user when they enter the nodal point of the view. The panoramas
or 'urban spheres' as we call them, are open source files linking to imagery outside of Google
Earth on sites such as Flickr, which quickly enables us to create a sense of location and place.
Google Earth has been fundamental to the development of the Visual City and it is this to
that we now turn.

9.3 Visual cities and the visual Earth

The World Wide Web has provided a revolution in the way we obtain, distribute and react to
information and we now take for granted the ability to search, edit and publish information
regardless of location. The first commercially available browser, Netscape, based on the
earlier Mosaic, was released in 1994 and much has happened in terms of the way we now
distribute, manipulate and visualize data since that time. It is arguable that we also take
for granted to ability to zoom into any location on the globe and view various levels of
informational and visual data in a three-dimensional environment. Yet it is barely 24 months,
at the time of writing, since the original Keyhole Earth Browser was re-branded and launched
as Google Earth.
Google Earth is the current buzz word in terms of geographic information and is covered
in detail by Michael Goodchild in Chapter 2. The importance of Google Earth to the Visual