Once the bubble is established, the base station can pick up data from hundreds, possibly thousands, of sensors in the area. One of the advantages of the New Internet is that all of these sensors will have their own Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (the New Internet allows an almost unlimited number of IP addresses for almost every conceivable object, including webcams and RFIDs), allowing direct access to any one of them. For instance, a policeman about to enter an area can first get a bird's-eye-view of that area, see (on a 3D animated display, which he can rotate and interact with) where video cameras are located, and then address a particular camera and get a video feed from it. He can do the same with gas or radiation detectors. (Precisely this type of interaction has been tested in "shadow exercises" for Homeland Security by San Diego State University, where Eric Frost and Bob Welty, co-directors of the Center for Information Technology and Infrastructure (CITI) supported emergency response teams operating throughout the Super Bowl and other events — see www.shadowbowl.com.)

The COVER base station merges the different types of GIS data (both 2D and 3D) on advanced high-speed onboard computers and storage and makes it available to the teams operating in the area. The availability of 3D virtual versions of the urban terrain allows the team elements to conduct "mission rehearsals" — traveling through the virtual terrain, interacting with each other and with simulated crisis elements such as dirty bombs or terrorists — before moving into the actual physical space. This use of 3D animation was widely practiced before each of the two recent Gulf wars, where military crews used networked simulators to conduct missions in digitized versions of Iraq's landscape and towns, with the ability to make mistakes (such as getting lost) while still in a safe place, BEFORE the actual operation started. COVER will bring this type of simulation capability to joint military/civilian teams, which will enter the virtual world with their on-hand digital displays connected to the base station via the wireless WLAN.

The armored vehicle the COVER system is housed in.

COVER (which is supported by military, civilian and university sponsors) will serve as a 3D GIS center during future responses to crisis operations. It will contain 3D versions of the areas it is moving through; if these databases do not exist, COVER will conduct its own scanning operations. Organizing, storing and retrieving the vast amounts of terrain-based data will be a major challenge; for this, COVER can use versions of the existing DAM (digital asset management) tools from the entertainment community (such as NXN's Alienbrain Studio), which are adept at letting users look for data graphically (by thumbnails or previews) rather than by long technical descriptions, and also enable collaboration with graphic interaction — such as letting a user circle a window in a photo with a digital marker pen and ask his teammates, "What's this?" (He can also attach other photos or video clips as reference material.)

Discovering the 3D World
3D GIS will have several effects on our community. One will be a tremendous volume of work — it will take untold thousands of man-hours to digitize just the major areas of large American and other global cities, not to mention the miles of oil and gas pipelines, airports, petrochemical plants and other construction projects that will be re-created as high-resolution virtual environments. As aforementioned, this will keep both large and small GIS and graphics companies busy for years to come. But there is another effect that may well take place. We will start looking at the world — and our knowledge about it — in a different way. The traditional means of educating someone about the world was far away from an actual location, in a school of some sort, where volumes of facts (geography, history, economics, text and photos) were funneled into the student (in a fashion somewhat similar to stuffing a turkey or a Christmas goose), in the hopes that he/she would coordinate related facts and remember them many years later when arriving at a particular locale. For future generations, the relevant facts for any particular location may be tied to that place as a dataset, to be discovered by the interested visitor that comes to that particular neighborhood. In a way, coming upon such a location-based treasure could be similar to grabbing a "power-up" in a videogame. Discovering multimedia packets of information — having a particular place literally "speak to us" — could alter our mindsets and expectations about the world around us. The GIS professionals — especially the graphics wizards — working in the many projects in this area are looking forward to that day.

Christopher Harz is an executive consultant for new media. He has produced video games for films such as Spawn, The Fifth Element, Titanic and Lost in Space. As Perceptronics svp of program development, Harz helped build the first massively multiplayer online game worlds, including the $240 million 3-D SIMNET. He worked on C3I, combat robots and war gaming at the RAND Corp., the military think tank.