Virtual geographic environments

Virtual geographic environments (VGEs) are geographic analysis tools. A VGE is a multi-user, intelligent virtual environment which represents an actual geographic feature; it is used for geo-spatial analysis, geo-visualization, and geography-related planning and decision making, as well as for training, education, and entertainment.

An extension of Michael Batty's virtual geography theory (Batty, 1997), VGEs are a web- and computer-based environment built for geographic understanding and problem solving. Their correspondence to the real world allows computer-aided geographic experiments (CAGEs) to be conducted, in which human–environment interactions can be represented, simulated, and analyzed. Furthermore, VGEs can help researchers to reproduce the past, replicate the current world, and predict the future (Batty 1997; Lin and Gong 2001; Lin, Huang, and Lu 2009).

With a VGE, researchers from different areas and fields can collaboratively perform CAGEs. They can build virtual geographic scenes of different scales with integrated geographic data derived from various resources. Geographic analyses are complex because they not only involve statistical relationships but also the mechanisms driving the phenomenon in question (Goodchild, Yuan, and Cova 2007); a VGE allows researchers to simulate and explore those dynamic geographic phenomena and processes using geographic analysis models.

Social factors can also be incorporated into the virtual environment. For example, emissions of polluted air caused by economic development and population expansion can be taken into account in experiments related to air quality management. Users can observe the interaction between their activities and air quality changes.