Travails in the Third Dimension: A Critical Evaluation of Three-dimensional Geographical Visualization - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 199

10
Travails in the Third Dimension:
A Critical Evaluation of
Three-dimensional Geographical
Visualization

Ifan D. H. Shepherd
Middlesex University Business School, Middlesex University, London

10.1 Introduction

Interactive three-dimensional computer graphics are not new. Almost half a century ago,
Ivan Sutherland developed the Sketchpad system (Sutherland, 1963b), which introduced the
first interactive CAD-like toolkit that he felt would 'generalize nicely to three dimensional
drawing' (Sutherland, 1963a, p. 138). Just a few years later, he was experimenting with a
head-mounted three-dimensional display device (Sutherland, 1969). Even the use of three-
dimensional computer graphics to visualize data is far from novel. In the 1980s, for example, a
special report (McCormick, DeFanti and Brown, 1987) revealed a burgeoning use of the third
dimension in what was then termed 'scientific visualization', and by the end of the decade sig-
nificant progress had been made in the development of three-dimensional GIS (Raper, 1989).
Interactive three-dimensional computer graphics became more widely available in the
1990s due to the spread of relatively inexpensive graphics display technology, and domes-
tic users of computer games were soon flying, running, driving and shooting their way
around extensive and increasingly realistic three-dimensional worlds. 1 More recently still,

1 It is generally agreed that Wolfenstein 3D , a first-person shooter game, which was released by id Software in
1992, triggered the initial mass appeal of 3D computer games. This success was followed in 1993 by Doom ,
and in 1996 by Quake , with its full 3D engine (id Software, 2007).