By allowing viewers to virtually “fly” from space down to ground level through progressively higher resolution data sets (he aimed at a 1sqm definition), Digital Earth would enable the display of information related to a specific location from an infinite number of sources. Digital Earth would enable to organize this mass of data in an efficient way and, more significantly, to open “the silos” to the public. This information, however, simply lay unutilized in what he called “electronic silos of data”. “We possess unprecedented amounts of geographical information”, especially satellite imagery, Gore noted. (Gore, 1998)ġIn a famous speech delivered to the California Science Center in Los Angeles in 1998, former US vice-President Al Gore expressed the need for a “Digital Earth”, a “multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data” (ibid.). She can also visualize the environmental information that she and other students all over the world have collected as part of the GLOBE project. Using the system’s voice recognition capabilities, she is able to request information on land cover, distribution of plant and animal species, real-time weather, roads, political boundaries, and population. Of course, terrain is only one of the many kinds of data with which she can interact. Having found an area of the planet she is interested in exploring, she takes the equivalent of a ‘magic carpet ride’ through a 3-D visualization of the terrain.
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