The Visual City - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 196

9.5 The future: the personal city

A familiar theme is the decrease in knowledge required to create and present geographical
information, which is leading to a direct increase in the amount of information available.
As we have seen, user-created data can be visualized within a global system such as Tweets
and Flickr via Atlas and Microsoft Live or as personal tracks via mobile devices within
Google Earth. While all these data streams can be built into one Visual City, such as our
Virtual London, there is also a move to more personalized geographic data. The editing
of Google Maps to create a location previously involved the manual editing of code and a
moderate knowledge of XML, but with the release of Google's My Maps it is now possible
to create one's own map in a matter of minutes. The My Map's application is a web-based
service which allows the user to add points, lines and polygons as an overlay to Google
Maps. This again is a significant addition to the visualization of the cityscape, both in two
and three dimensions, as the overlays created can be exported to Google Earth or indeed
any KML viewer. In addition to the ability to add points, polygons and lines to the map is
the integration of video via either Google Video or YouTube.
In essence, we are but at the beginning of what will be a revolution in social, visual and
informational data plotted geographically by general users. The ability to create one's own
map of the cityscape is of prime importance as these maps can be either public or private. If
the user chooses the public option which is the default, the map becomes searchable within
the Google general search engine. Information embedded in the map thus, if searched for,
directly links to the map. As such the map, be it city-based or otherwise, becomes the key
interface to informational space.
The rise of social networks provides us with the ability to look down on the city and
view the activities that its citizens are involved in. This ability provides unique social data
and an insight into how the citizens are thinking, working and socializing. At the moment,
Twitters are two-dimensional, but it is a short step to move these data streams into a three-
dimensional world such as Google Earth. If you then combine this with avatars as in Second
Life, then you not only have a Visual City with visual and informational space, you also
introduce perceptual space into the context. This is more than a Visual City, for we now
stand at the threshold of a Visual Earth.

References

Bell, J. (2006) Virtual spaces and places; cyberspace; space and place in computing. Presence
Research . Available at: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/ ∼ janzb/place/virtual.htm (accessed 3 De-

cember 2007).
Benedikt, M. (1996) Information in space is space in information. In Images form Afar. Scientific
Visualisation - An Anthology , Michelson, A. and Stjernfelt, F. (eds). Copenhagen, Akademisk
Forlaf, pp. 161-171.
Cross, M. (2007) Copyright sinks virtual planning. The Guardian 24 January 2007.
Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City . Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Mitchell, W. J. (1994) Picture Theory . Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.
Rigg, J. (2007) What is a Panorama, PanoGuide. Available at: www.panoguide.com/reference/
panorama.html (accessed 3 December 2007)