Earth Through the Looking Glass
This activity is bourne out of research conducted at the HITLabNZ, which is based at the University of Canterbury. A virtual Earth is placed on an Imaginality workspace. A turntable is used to rotate the earth and a handheld pointer acts as a virtual looking glass. This virtual lens can magnify a view of the land below, but is more often used to reveal other layers of information including surface temperature, carbon dioxide levels and the lights of Earth at night. This information is laid over the correct location on the Earth, so it becomes a very intuitive interface for exploring relationships between the different sets of data (for example, searching for a correlation between the brightness of man-man lights and carbon dioxide levels). One button on the pointer toggles through the layers of information in the lens and the other button applies that layer of information to the whole Earth. details unavailable... gallery...
The movie should appear in the area above. If not, you will need to install QuickTime by following instructions here. To save this movie to your computer, click on the drop-down button in the bottom-right corner of QuickTime and click “Save Source”.
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