Building a Sense of Scale and Geographic Context: Virtual Field Trips
Created With Google Earth and QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR)
Ronald C. Schott
Fort Hays State University Geosciences Dept., 600 Park St.,
Hays, KS 67601, United States
Virtual field trips are no substitute
for observing rocks in their natural habitat. They can, however, offer a
number of advantages that are not as easily experienced in the traditional
field or lab setting. Chief among these is the ability to integrate
information at a wide variety of scales. Virtual globes such as Google Earth
are ideally suited to illustrate the spatial relationships between geologic
features on scales from the entire planet down to small topographic features
such as hills or valleys. By combining Google Earth's native satellite
imagery with more detailed imagery and/or map overlays one can emphasize a
variety of geologic information at a range of scales. QuickTime Virtual
Reality (QTVR) panoramas are well suited for viewing features from the
outcrop to regional scale; QTVR object movies are well adapted to viewing
objects at hand sample down to microscopic scales. All of these techniques
offer some level of interactivity for the viewer.
Integrating these tools to create virtual field trips can be done in a
number of ways. By embedding hyperlinks within QTVR images or panoramas a
sequence of geographically related virtual field trip "stops" can be linked
together. Alternately, a series of images could be linked to "zoom" to
different scales (i.e., from tectonic to microscopic scales). Because Google
Earth has web-browser capabilities built in, it is possible to use HTML and
KML to create a navigation scheme that ties various geographically related
"stops" together. The integrated use of these tools should give students a
better sense of the relationships of scale and geographic context than
traditional field or lab experiences alone.