Welcome to the actual Gallery, which has links to QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) and QuickTime (QT) movies of digital topography. Each movie consists of a 3D perspective of the map area that the user can rotate using the mouse to view the area from any direction. Some movies have contours draped over topography or let you raise and lower a water plane, so that you can better visualize how the contours are portraying the shape of the land. Some movies have numbered topographic places for students to locate on the contour map; "advanced versions" of these have numbers located on topographic features that are more subtle and more challenging to locate. To use these number movies for location exercises, view and save the contour map you want, and print it with any graphics program so that it fits on one page.
To use this site you will need QuickTime installed on your computer, either as a plug-in for your browser or as a stand-alone application to run downloaded files. To access a movie, click on the link below to bring up the QTVR movie for that area. Alternatively, you can download the file to your computer and run QuickTime as an application separate from your browser. I recommend that you download the files and run QuickTime independent of your browser so you can use the movie again and again (we hope you'll want to).
How to Operate Movies: Most are QTVR movies, where you rotate the terrain by clicking and dragging your mouse to either the left or the right. Some movies have other things happening when you click and drag your mouse up and down -- for example, tilting the terrain, raising a water plane, or changing the amount of shaded relief. Non-QTVR movies allow you to simply play the movie by pushing the play (arrow) button, or you can step through the movie by dragging the small diamond that shows your position in the movie. In either case, the movies begin with a perspective viewed toward the north (the little red triangle).
Caution: The QTVR movies are mostly 1 to 3 MB, and so may require 10 or more minutes to download on slow Internet connections. I made the movies as small as I could without sacrificing quality and usability. If you want a quicker view, check out the single 3D image instead. Contour intervals are mostly 30 meters. Use your BACK button to return to this page.
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© Copyright 2001 by Stephen J Reynolds and Julia K. Johnson. These images can be freely used for educational purposes as long as the source is cited.
Page created by: S. Reynolds
