Posthuman Blues

Taking a virtual view of the world

"'Using Vplanet Explorer, anyone can set off on a journey to discover new regions in 3D, rather than staring at a flat map and trying to picture its scenery,' says Eric Martin, coordinator of the IST project Vplanet. 'With the click of a mouse, they can fluently fly through terrain in real time, on a standard PC.'

"The project's software merges data from different sources into a single 3D database, using techniques such as filtering, correlation and specially developed 3D algorithms. The partners concentrated their work on surface areas and sub-metric resolution, taking advantage of improvements in pixel resolution in today's satellite data." (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Area 51, anybody?