Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR

Google Earth VR (GEVR), released in 2017, claims to put the whole world within reach using virtual reality (VR). Relying on sensors that track a user’s position and gestures in actual space, GEVR suggests that users can experience its virtual Earth in the same way that they experience the real one: as a world they actively embody rather than a representation they examine from the outside. While GEVR conjures a dematerialized world, it also interrogates how what counts as a material world may always be suspended between embodied, technical, and aesthetic mediations. If ‘the whole world’ – which exceeds individual perception – can only be conceived through aesthetic logics, what do the particular aesthetics of GEVR tell us about the way our world is imaged and imagined today? What are the implications of the way it stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional, dimensional coordination? What does the disorienting experience it offers suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global everywhere-at-once?

The virtual earth. The case study of the Rose garden in Alcoy

The Viaducte des Arts at the Coulée verte René-Dumont in Paris (1993) or the High Lane in New York (2009) have managed to increase the urban quality in large areas of their cities. In both cases, a costly infrastructure of disused highways was reused to generate a planted promenade or a linear park getting back a dynamic point of view at a height of about ten meters above the city.With the perspective of the time elapsed since its construction we must conclude that, although their structural singularity does not make them exportable to other cities, their simple constructive conception does. In them there is a common denominator that we can define as virtual earth. That concept is linked to the current technical capacity to generate green spaces over spaces of any other use. It is a new fertile land that allows the resolution of the complex problem produced by the accumulation of uses and requirements in the same place.In the present study case the objective is to recover an urban garden in Alcoy, known as la the Rose garden, without having to reduce the number of parking spaces of the garage that was built under it. At the same time, the project has to meet the surface requirements of earthen mantle necessary to consider restored the use of green zone. The solution solves in eighty centimeters of thickness a manufactured earth capable of assuming bulky trees that return to the city and to the Rose garden their lost atmosphere.

A Method of Bridge Outline Extraction Based on Airborne LiDAR Data

Automatic and quickly extraction of bridge information from LiDAR data is of great significance in building 3D digital city and virtual earth. Especially the extraction of bridge outline is a crucial problem. It is a concern of many scholars research focus. This paper presented a method of bridge extraction using airborne LiDAR data. The biggest advantage of the method is based on priori-knowledge and by analyzing the spatial structural characteristics and geometric characteristics of the bridge. Experiments show that this method has a good accuracy compared with the result of expert interpretation.

NetCDF-Based Visualization of Marine Environment Data Using Virtual Earth

For the characteristics of the marine environment data with multiple-formats, heterogeneous, multi-dimensional and dynamic in structure and time, this paper studies the three-dimensional visualization method of the NetCDF-based marine environment data. On the basis of comprehensive analysis the NetCDF data model in principle, data organization, scheduling methods and so on, the present study proposes NetCDF to store these data, and designs a 3D dynamic rendering model for typical marine environment data based on virtual earth, implements the dynamic representation and spatial-temporal analysis, which includes marine feature field visualization, the attributes information query and the process characteristics analysis. The practical application shows that the method of this paper can represent massive marine environment data efficiently and vividly, it provides a powerful visualization auxiliary tool for the representation of the complex ocean phenomena, spatial-temporal analysis and trend prediction.