VGFPS: An OpenSimulator-Based Virtual Geographic Environment for Geological Field Practice

In traditional geological field practice (GFP), there are many problems, such as waste of human and material resources, dispersion of geological phenomenon and failure to reproduce geological processes, which lead to the inefficiency of traditional education. Recently, virtual geographic environment (VGE) has become increasingly popular. It can provide us an immersive, interactive and collaborative three-dimensional (3D) multi-user virtual environment which can help us to solve the above problems. In this paper, we present a Virtual Geological Field Practice System (VGFPS) for Huyu Region based on OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world server which can be used to create VGEs. VGFPS integrates texts, images, videos and other multimedia with digital elevation models (DEMs), remote sensing (RS) images, buildings and landscapes, geological process simulation models and in-world scripts to enable teachers and students to explore, navigate, interact in virtual environment and communicate, collaborate with each other. Practices show it’s feasible to use VGEs to make GFP education more effective and it can be applied to the domain of virtual education.