Virtual Reality as an Interface to Gis -focus on Www

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) traditionally handle very complex datasets and operations; therefore the interface design is a hard task. Most GIS software has a CAD background and as they are highly graphic; a GIS interface has always been a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and 3D online GIS requires a special GUI. “Virtual Reality ”(VR) is an environment where the human perception of a simulated environment is as close to the perception of the real world as possible. There are significant developments, but it is a new technology and will need to evolve much more before it can claim to satisfy the human perception fully. In any case, the nature of today’s VR practice creates a natural desire to make this environment more giving than the natural, by adding more information, because it is possible. To use the VR as an interface to a rich database (as in GIS) is one obvious outcome of this thinking. There are several proposals and test implementations of using caveor Head Mounted Display (HMD)-based VR as an interface for GIS systems. The cave environment and the HMD devices have their limitations though, they are not accessible to everyone (they are still very expensive). The public version of VR, however much the quality of the experience goes down, can be seen as the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) models. This is for obvious reasons; like the powerful communication environment it lives in, WWW, and that it does not require any special devices for a simplified VR experience (1)(2)(3)(4)(5) In this paper, we will present a review of the current literature on VR and GIS combinations and an implementation of a VRML/X3D model with some interactive features to present the potential use of VRML as a 3D GIS interface. Note: This is a modified version of another paper published by the same author in the Journal of Surveying Science in Finland (30).