Chapter 18 Networked Collaborative Virtual Geographic Environments : Design and Implementation

3D visualization and virtual reality are increasingly important in geographic information science and play a wide role in applications of geographic information technology to the public including managers, policy analysts, geography teachers, children and many other niche groups . Up to now, Google Earth has been downloaded about 200 million times, and has widely been used in daily life by hundreds of thousands of people . On the other hand, in view of the requirements of geocollaboration by group of users dealing with complicated geo-problems such as geographic planning of regional sustainable development, impacts of global environment change, and emergency response, more and more effort is being placed on collaborative visualization and collaborative GIS . By considering the integration of network-based 3D geo-visualization like Google Earth in the context of collaborative visualization, what are the forms of such new systems? In order to deal with open, large, and very complex interacting computer and human systems, Qian and Dai [11] put forward the concept of a workshop hall for metasynthetic engineering which would integrate human group intelligence and networked computing power. Based on the concept of virtual geographic environments (VGE) [3,12] and the workshop hall metasynthetic engineering, and incorporating geocollaboration and distributed virtual environment technologies, this chapter addresses the basic conceptual framework for a networked collaborative VGE (CVGE), as well as developing a prototype which illustrates the form and basic functions of the CVGE.