Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Digital Geology – Moving towards Geological Field Trips 2.0

With Digital Geology,

we've brought the geological field trip into the office environment.

Let me share with you the next steps of this innovative journey.

I'm standing here in the iScope Virtual Reality Centre

in the Netherlands.

And behind me you can see the Escudeiros outcrop in the southern Pyrenees,

one of the stops of our present day geological field trips.

The picture is a 360 x 180-degree, high-resolution panoramic photograph

that we recently took during one of our reconnaissance trips.

Standing here in Rijswijk,

I can now navigate you through the geology

and zoom in and explain relevant geological details to you,

as I would do when I would be physically in the field.

I can do this in a collaborative environment

where people at different locations can connect with me at the same time.

The 360 x 180-degree panoramic picture is geo-referenced

and can be combined with, for example, satellite imagery, Google Earth maps,

geoscience, topographical, multimedia, and other sources of data.

It will be presented as a low-cost and intuitive, web-based solution

accessible to everyone, at any place, at any time,

and linked to our knowledge management setup.

In 2017, we intend to collect these high-resolution panoramic pictures

for all the stops of the geological field trips

that we run in the Subsurface Faculty.

We will translate these into virtual outcrop stops

that we will integrate into our Digital Geology project.

Ultimately, we want to make our virtual outcrop stops

a fully immersive experience.

The best has yet to come.

Enjoy the future.