VIRTUAL GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS: FEELING IT IN PERSON AND KNOWING IT BEYOND REALITY

As a new generation of geographic language evolved from map and GIS, Virtual Geographic Environments (VGEs) has proposed and developed for more than 10 years. Not only focus on data management and expression, the geographic process simulation and analysis are also highly valued This integrated system in terms of sub-environments (data environment, modeling and simulation environment, interactive environment and collaborative environment) has the potential to facilitate the cognition into dynamic geographic process by supporting the multiple interactions for feeling it in person and the collaborative geographic experiments for knowing it beyond reality. By reviewing the previous work on Geographic Information Science (GISciences) and VGEs, this paper discussed the framework of rapidly developed VGEs based on the work done by VGEs researchers. And then some experiments conducted by our group are introduced to illustrate the application of this framework and the benefits for geographic process research and social security and development. At the end of this paper, the challenges and chances for VGEs research is discussed