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OK. Humor me and follow this train of thought... I contend the time is now to build our virtual cities. We've been holding off because the effort looks large and the returns perhaps inconsequential. Various company battles have crippled the 3-D Web implementation over the years. The initial 3-D Web efforts ripped through too much venture capital too quickly (I'll suggest some gory details later). But, I assure you, they had a great vision. Their technical specifications were sound enough for us to use. Now is the time to build.
We have Flickr demonstrating the interest in world citizens to share photography images online. We have YouTube demonstrating the interest in sharing video. Building models of buildings is fun and rewarding. Participating in a large community effort demonstrates the power of humans to work together. We don't waste materials when we use electrons to build virtual content. And yet we get the satisfaction of creation. Once we understand how useful a virtual model is to have of our city, we'll all be motivated to participate in its development. The methodology behind making virtual buildings has been around for more than ten years. There is no reason we can't work together to build our virtual city. They will look spectacular. The example to the left here is virtual. Assembled from photographic images and base geometries acquired from building plans and/or study of multiple photographs taken at different angles.
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3-D Web History | Building Virtual Cities | Viewing Virtual Cities | Virtual Cities History | Historical Preservation | More Links... | |
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Virtual buildings created from real physical structures in our community are natural to share. They belong on a virtual earth, situated exactly relative to where they exist in physical cities. The picture to the right shows a simple example. Virtual structures are placed to align with aerial photography of a city center. It's natural to explore virtual earth. It's enjoyable to participate in building the model we're exploring. This site explains how to build and enjoy.
There are Web 3-D viewing options out there and they continue to get better. We're playing video games in rich visual 3-D scenes, flying through virtual spaces at blazing speed. Google, NASA, and Microsoft are providing us with virtual globes. We drill down and see aerial photographs of our cities. I content that we are very close to walking through them. A socially-mediated, Web 2.0 model can get us there once enough of us are motivated to participate. How can we participate? We can sketch up our homes, favorite buildings, and historical structures and put them together to create our cities and experience them on-line. We just need to provide a community process with which to participate. The Web is full of community models that are emerging in every shared experience imaginable. This site is dedicated to inspiring you to participate in your virtual city through providing a thorough history, present, and future place to explore. You need to know how they will be built and used to document our civilization for future residents to explore. |  |
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Others Have Suggested the way Before:
Zanpo | Martin Dodge in 1997 |
Martin's Atlas of Cyberspace | Rutger's Virtual Cities
| Microsoft's Work | UiTM | GEOconnection International Magazine
Top Ten Reasons To Build Virtual Cities:
Virtual Cities should be iterative, perpetual, and revisionist:
We don't need any deadlines for building of our virtual cities. Never. We can just keep building them. Make them better. Iterate. Go back in time to model structures from times gone by. Move forward in time and model new structures we dream about having some day. Professional architects can supply their models for us to admire. The rest of us can do our best and fill in missing structures as we ramp the effort up. The tools are already there for us to do it quickly. But, we don't need to do it quickly if its for community education and alliance purposes. Those who prefer can savor the process and build beautiful versions of buildings. Every effort can be saved in a database and referenced when we want them. Database storage is ridiculously cheap at long last. There are proper ways to save all our attempts. We can use tags to identify the different versions and walk through cities with explore of our favorite versions: Photorealistic precise models; artistically rendered models; Graffiti tagged models. They can all co-exist for all to share. We build community pride by participating in a shared model for the world to see. We foster a shared vision of where we want to be. We come to understand the reasons our cities are what they are. We educate ourselves as to what they need to become to support quality of life for all world citizens.
Virtual Cities should be open source content
We should build our virtual cities first and foremost to promote our community to ourselves. We want to feel good about where we live. No one should own our virtual city content. Sure, if we get good at the process, we can create models for hire that interested clients can use for whatever purpose. They can pay us to do that work. But, we retain the content for the benefit of all. There is a marketplace in there somewhere, but it isn't the top reason we will start the effort. We want to represent our collective to ourselves. Along the way we can experience the joy of building and the reflection of how much satisfaction we can gain from participating in a citywide effort with our neighbors. We can walk through town and tell our stories. The process is fun like building with Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and Legos. Or like building a train set. But, our results are more accessible and available to everyone through digital content.
How Do you convince yourself that Virtual Cities are Coming Soon?
Have you seen Activeworlds? It's over a decade old. Have you seen There.com? It's been around for five years. Have you seen Second Life? It's got millions of residents. Our virtual cities can exist in all these platforms once we've built them. They will be portable. This site aims to help you understand how it can happen and how you can start to participate. You'll learn a little computer science, a little geospatial geography, and a little 3-D modeling format structure. There is a history of virtual cities already. Virtual Kobe was built to live inside a Silicon Graphics high-end workstation in order to help visualize its rebuilding after a devistating earthquake in January of 1995.
Dive into some supporting links:
3-D Web History
The History of Virtual Cities |
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