Category:Virtual Reality

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Touring the Home Planet with Google Earth VR

Ready for the new Google Earth?

Voila! -- https://www.google.com/earth/

Google Earth for Chrome and Android

Virtual Reality for Google Earth was launched in 2016.

Watch the Earth "Voyager" video - https://youtu.be/O-XidwKsKAE

Up in the Treetops of the Forests of the World

SJS / Siterunner:

Back in the early days of what is often seen as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement, Don Perry was one of the very first scientists to invent techniques that enabled him to explore the rainforest canopy. Don's initial canopy web is now described as one of the very first 'zip lines', although in the early days when I collaborated with Don we simply called it "up in the web".

The "canopy web" was assembled tree to tree with a creative use of riggings and zip lines (before zip lines were being used by any explorers in the treetops.) The canopy web was high in the sky and brought Don up into what we wrote about as the "the real jungle". The real jungle wasn't a Victorian era picture of English explorers hacking their way through dense African jungles. The jungle was 'up above' most often, a rich tapestry of diversity that is now often described as the richest biospheres on earth. In the early days of exploration, no humans were 'up there' living and studying.

In the days when Don first ascended into the canopy forests, he was photographing, recording, studying many species that had never before glimpsed by humans as their whole life cycles were in the canopies of the world.

The stories, reports, scientific data and images Don brought together in the course of his work we shared with some of the top media in countries on every continent.

In the 1980s, the work opened eyes and at time Don was compared to Jacques Cousteau in that Cousteau's work made real and vivid life under the ocean and Don Perry's work made life above the jungle/rainforest floor real and vivid.

During those days, we came to realize that in order to protect the forests and biospheres, as part of a larger call to protect connected earth systems of life, we should bring people into the canopy. It came to be that we were one of a first generation who believed in and created new ways of seeing, not the old world vacationing, but "adventure expeditions".

Welcome to the canopy, go up, ride the web, see and feel, hear and experience yourself what it's like to be alive in the trees.

"Ecotourism" some called it, others called it going back to our human roots in an evolutionary tree. The richness and living diversity of the canopy, essential in an "integral ecology" that seeks to protect our home planet even as the forests fulfill their roles in the carbon cycle, is made much more evident when one has fully experienced what one is protecting. That's how we saw it, that's how we wrote about it.

As a result of their experience, many have experienced "life up above" in the years since and many have returned home to their communities wanting to preserve and save the richest biosphere on earth.

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A New Ecotourism Up Above

Today, as we move into a new era of technology, the potential of virtual reality is increasingly being considered in new ways of seeing and experiencing.

It is your siterunner's hope that the VR experience moves 'up above' again.

The potential of VR can open eyes to the 'big picture' of the whole earth and our magnificent blue planet in space, our home, and how we are all connected.

The potential can translate in every language and every country and bring planetary awareness of how together we need to act to protect our only home.

The potential of VR can immerse us in the richness of the forests and canopies of the earth, wildlife environments, and unique perspectives in biospheres with point of view connections.

Let's hope that a vision of earth up above from space, an astropov as we might see, and visions within on earth environments as we roam with VR Avatar-like presence, will assist in creating an "Overview Effect" and planet citizen empathy that changes our individual lives and how we live of lives together.

A new planetary awareness can bring very good change. We need it. It's time for new realities.

-- SJS / January 2016

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