Digital Earth Project

Vision statement by Al Gore

In 1998, Al Gore, as Vice-President of the United States, introduced the more dramatic vision of a Digital Earth:

I believe we need a "Digital Earth". A multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data.

Imagine, for example, a young child going to a Digital Earth exhibit at a local museum. After donning a head-mounted display, she sees Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in, using higher and higher levels of resolution, to see continents, then regions, countries, cities, and finally individual houses, trees, and other natural and man-made objects. 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. Of course, terrain is only one of the many kinds of data with which she can interact. Using the systems' 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. She can also visualize the environmental information that she and other students all over the world have collected as part of the GLOBE project. This information can be seamlessly fused with the digital map or terrain data. She can get more information on many of the objects she sees by using her data glove to click on a hyperlink. To prepare for her family's vacation to Yellowstone National Park, for example, she plans the perfect hike to the geysers, bison, and bighorn sheep that she has just read about. In fact, she can follow the trail visually from start to finish before she ever leaves the museum in her hometown.

She is not limited to moving through space, but can also travel through time. After taking a virtual field-trip to Paris to visit the Louvre, she moves backward in time to learn about French history, perusing digitized maps overlaid on the surface of the Digital Earth, newsreel footage, oral history, newspapers and other primary sources. She sends some of this information to her personal e-mail address to study later. The time-line, which stretches off in the distance, can be set for days, years, centuries, or even geological epochs, for those occasions when she wants to learn more about dinosaurs.

Obviously, no one organization in government, industry or academia could undertake such a project. Like the World Wide Web, it would require the grassroots efforts of hundreds of thousands of individuals, companies, university researchers, and government organizations. Although some of the data for the Digital Earth would be in the public domain, it might also become a digital marketplace for companies selling a vast array of commercial imagery and value-added information services. It could also become a "collaboratory"-- a laboratory without walls — for research scientists seeking to understand the complex interaction between humanity and our environment.

Source: Vice President Al Gore, The Digital Earth:Understanding our planet in the 21st Century, The First International Symposium on Digital Earth, San Francisco, June 5-7 1998: http://www.isde5.org/al_gore_speech.htm

Status Report

Kim Veltman:

“One year later, this led to the Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth signed by “some 500 scientists, engineers, educators, managers and industrial entrepreneurs from 20 countries and regions.” By 2001, NEC had developed their own version of a Virtual Earth. In early 2004, the US Department of Defense announced that it would construct a 1:1 scale model of the entire earth. By late 2004, this vision also included NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2005, Microsoft launched their beta version of a Virtual Earth. By 2006, it became clear that Microsoft was working with NASA and also working directly with the US Department of Defense (DOD) in creating their new Virtual Earth.

A preliminary result of these developments is an integration of image capturing devices and mapping devices ranging from satellite images to street views in an approach called Windows Local Live. At present the demos entail only two cities: i.e. Seattle and San Francisco. They show how one can zoom from space to a particular point on a street or sidewalk and then choose between a view from a sports car, a regular automobile or from the viewpoint of a walking pedestrian. In order to achieve this, the idea of the Aspen movie map is being applied to 7,000 cities world-wide using the latest new camera technologies. Admirers of the system have described it as a Google Maps in 3-D. The effects are often amazing and yet they remain fairly banal at a cognitive or intellectual level. To be sure, these developments have obvious military implications, and clearly have significant applications for security, traffic management, police efforts and many aspects of environmental monitoring. As such, their role is mainly in administration and services.”

Source

Kim H. Veltman. Opening Keynote: “The New Book of Nature“, eARCOM 07. Sistemi informativi per l’Architettura Convegno Internazionale, Con il Patrocinio di UNESCO. Ministero dei Beni Culturali, CIPA, Regione Marche, Ancona-Portonovo Hotel La Fonte, 17-18-19 Maggio 2007.