Virtual City: A Few Typical Examples
Tourism oriented: just for visitors
Virtual city of Swansea, South Wales
has the usual features: tourist information, photos, and
an interactive map.
These features are very typical of virtual cities.
Virtual city of Basel, Switzerland
has a well designed
virtual city tour. A virtual tourist can start from any
point and walk to different places.
The directions the tourist can take are clearly indicated.
A tourist can walk around and see both the scenary and where he is in the map.
Digital Government oriented: also for residents and businesses
Virtual City Hall of
Yellowknife, Canada brings the city hall to the people.
The top page tells the story already. There are three
different categories of information items: for residents,
for businesses, and for tourists. It has many functional
purposes besides tourism.
Java is used, so that the interactive map is clickable
and allows one level of zooming in.
Virtual City Government
of Lubbock, USA does the same, including such information
items as employment opportunities, city council meeting agenda
and public meetings calendar.
Electronic Community oriented: even for social life
People are beginning to build electronic communities every where.
The simplest are chat groups. The more sophisticated ones
offer news services, banking services and so on. A few examples
will be discussed.
Virtual City
is for German speaking people. Its novel concept includes a virtual city map.
For example, if you click on La Jolla, you will see the "streets"
and "buildings" where people "live". There are even business areas,
industry parks and so on. There is also an electronic newspaper.
Kid City
are for kids and the map includes locations such as kid city zoo,
toy store, computer lab, cartoon cave, aqarium, science museum
and more.
Inhabiting the virtual city:
The design of social environments for electronic communities
provides a theoretical basis for developing electronic communities and
argues that the environment - i.e. the technical infrastructure and user interface - must provide the means to communicate social cues
and information: the participants must be able to perceive the social patterns of activity and affiliation and the community must be able to evolve a fluid and
subtle cultural vocabulary.
History oriented: returning to the Future
An ancient city such as
the city of Ani that was
the capital of an Armenian kingdom that
covered much of present
day Turkey can be revived as a virtual city.
An interesting concept in the design of the top page is that you
must click inside the entrance arch of the city gate to enter.
The
interactive map is Java enabled to show a photo as you
move your cursor to a certain scenic place.
History and more maps are also available.
Utopia oriented: for a better life
We now come full circle and return to the ancient dream of
Utopia and the modern dream of E-topia or V-topia.